VC Firm Foresight Ventures to Plow up to $200M in Web3 Startups Over 3 Years
Blockworks Exclusive: The year-old venture capital firm said it was focused on investment in “up-and-coming” projects with “disruptive potential”
Blockworks exclusive art by axel rangel
key takeaways
- The Shanghai-based company told Blockworks it would invest in projects focused on building out Web3, NFT and blockchain infrastructure
- The budding firm invests in the primary and secondary markets through equity as well as digital tokens
Crypto venture capital firm Foresight Ventures said it will invest hundreds of millions of dollars in Web3 startups and projects over a three-year horizon in a bid to capture a portion of the budding sector’s growth.
In a statement shared with Blockworks on Wednesday, Foresight said it will set aside between $100-$200 million in venture capital for a range of crypto assets, NFTs, blockchains and metaverses. The firm’s investment portfolio includes financial services platform Matrixport and metaverse developer Everyrealm, among a host of other budding Web3-focused businesses.
Venture capital continues to pour into the crypto industry’s Web3 and metaverse sector having already garnered billions in dollars over a relatively short period beginning in 2020.
That’s despite frothy market conditions having cooled from a hype cycle that has seen an explosion of investment in everything from providers of NFTs (non-fungible tokens) to virtual worlds seeking to leverage the new medium in an effort to reach new audiences.
Founded in April 2021, the Singapore and Shanghai-based company aims to provide additional support across its ecosystem for what it terms as “up-and-coming” projects with “disruptive potential.”
Binance Labs, Polygon, Chainlink, Avalanche, crypto exchange OKEx and NGC ventures, among others make up a part of Foresight’s ecosystem of partners used to bolster support for the VC’s chosen projects.
“We are at an exciting time in the evolution of Web3 and related technologies,” said Foresight’s co-founder Forest Bai. “We will continue to look for outside-the-box investment opportunities in that arena and support projects we feel have the potential to be market leaders in their space.
Bai, a former investment banker, added the firm would focus more on “contrarian investment opportunities” and that his firm had invested $10 million in the crypto primary market through simple agreement for future tokens. “At the same time, we also invested more than $100 million in the crypto secondary market,” Bai said.
Asked about the company’s future investment outlook, Bai told Blockworks that Foresight intends to invest with an 80/20 split of crypto-assets to equity and would focus on layer-1 and layer-2 solutions in addition to Web3.
Foresight’s General Partner Tony Cheng, who previously heralded from Sequoia Capital and 3G Capital as a TMT investor, said the firm provided him with an ability to dig deeper into the “Web3 rabbit hole.”
“I’m particularly interested in crypto infrastructure, scaling solutions and applications that bridge CeFi and DeFi,” said Cheng.
Foresight has $150 million in assets under management and said it mainly invests in the primary and secondary markets via both equity and digital tokens. Its ecosystem also includes crypto exchange Bitget and crypto wallet BitKeep — a top 3 wallet in the region boasting more than 4 million users, including 200,000 daily active users.
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