On the 24th of June, One of Silicon Valley's largest venture capital firms- Andreessen Horowitz, made headlines over the crypto investment market as they announced a new $2.2 Billion cryptocurrency-focused fund. With the aim of investing and making their mark in the volatile ecosystem, this fund is known to be the firm's biggest vertical-specific fund ever.
Andreessen Horowitz, established in early 2009, is known to be placed early bets on companies like Facebook, Instagram, Lyft, and Pinterest, all of which have seen major success. They were also one of the early investors in Libra, the Facebook-backed digital currency project. Their investment in cryptocurrency doesn't just start here, however, as it goes long back to 2013, with their first set of investments in cryptocurrency being small scale as they wished to enter the relatively newer market.
From there started the rise, with the first dedicated crypto fund being launched in 2018 with an investment of $300 million. This primary success paved way for further investment, with an initial investment of $515 million, which closed in April of last year. The latest fund, titled Crypto Fund III, has seen the investment also quadruple from the last set of investments,
This particular fund has seen the firm open up the investment to all possible stages, right from early seed-stage projects, to fully developed later-stage networks. This massively opens up the opportunity for them to look into a wider range of projects to fund and bring under their wing. Given the massive amount of start-ups and projects that are being undertaken in this particular sector, there is a massive potential for growth with the right projects in mind. Apart from just funding, Andreessen Horowitz are also offering regulatory and operational capabilities, with their Data Science and Research Services, which make their investments translate into a higher propensity of success for those projects.
Apart from just the finances, there have been additions to the operational capacity of the fund itself, to facilitate a much wider range of services and insights to the companies. The biggest of the names, however, is the former director of the Securities and Exchange Commission(SEC), Bill Hinman as an advisory partner. Bill had spearheaded the SEC's early work on digital assets and is very well versed in the operations of cryptocurrency, and its regulatory frameworks. Another famous hire was Racheal Horwitz, who led communications at multiple organizations such as Twitter, Facebook, and Google, and was also the first Vice President of communications at Coinbase, a platform to trade cryptocurrency, which has also been seen investment from AH.
Many other hires, such as Tomicah Tillemann and Brent McIntosh, have held major posts at multiple organizations that work with cryptocurrency and in policy-making relating to crypto and digital assets. All these represent the bigger picture, which looks at cryptocurrency as a massive market and the potential for so much of growth. Andreessen Horwitz's latest venture isn't just a statement that they made as a company, but a statement towards seeing cryptocurrency grow into something much bigger!
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