CoinFund, a leading cryptonative investment firm and registered investment adviser, today announces the close of $158 million (M) CoinFund Seed IV Fund LP (“Seed IV” or “The Fund”), backed by a combination of sophisticated institutional investors, family offices, and high net worth individuals. CoinFund Seed IV LP exceeded its initial target fundraising goal of $125M. The Fund will support pre-seed and seed-stage investments in new and ambitious founding teams across the web3 ecosystem. The CoinFund team is proud to head into its ninth investment year after raising over $550M in the last 18 months across venture and liquid investment strategies. 

Founded in 2015 at a Brooklyn kitchen table by Highbridge Capital Management and Amazon alum Jake Brukhman, and later joined by co-founder and American Capital alum Alex Felix, CoinFund is now supported by a world-class interdisciplinary global team of nearly 30 people with more than 100 investments across six investment vehicles. In the face of reported industry headwinds, the most recent Fund is emblematic of CoinFund’s commitment to steward thoughtful, long-term investment in blockchain technology with a clear, yet non-consensus view of how next-generation applications will be built on web3 rails. 

“As CoinFund enters its ninth year, we continue to raise the bar for ourselves, our investors, and our portfolio companies,” said CEO and Co-Founder, Jake Brukhman. “Our investors have shown deep confidence in our people and strategy by continuing to allocate capital to our products in a bear market. Over the last two years, we’ve built a truly institutional-grade firm, the model of a large professional manager in web3. On the portfolio side, we are more bullish on the industry than ever and continue to invest in platform resources and personnel to help navigate a nascent and sometimes opaque category and support the growth of each portfolio company. CoinFund is proud to identify and back emergent teams and technologies before they trend.” 

In addition to the close of Seed IV, CoinFund is proud to announce a new mission and vision for the firm: CoinFund champions the leaders of the new internet - powered by foresight as active investors to achieve extraordinary results. The mission statement will anchor operations and developing brand work as the firm amplifies its story among leading entrepreneurs and crypto talent and builds out post-investment services for its portfolio companies.

Speaking to CoinFund’s mission, CIO and Co-Founder Alex Felix said, “Being a champion is more than writing a check. It's being present, celebrating and promoting the smaller, everyday efforts that ultimately lead to significant achievements and large outcomes. And we do this for more than just our entrepreneurs. We are in service to the crypto ecosystem, the leaders of the new internet, pursuing ideal conditions for founders to flourish and their technologies to thrive by unlocking our networks and fostering education.”

In the last month alone, CoinFund has announced investments in Cloudburst Technologies’ cyberthreat intelligence for digital currency fraud; ML compute protocol Gensyn; Giza, an AI platform for smart contracts and web3 protocols; Cosmos layer 1 blockchain Neutron; and Robert Leshner’s Superstate, building blockchain-based financial products. 

The formidable CoinFund investment team focused on deploying this capital into seed-stage deals is led by Managing Partners Jake Brukhman (focus areas currently include decentralization technologies and infrastructure, AI x web3); Alex Felix (marketplaces, infrastructure, financial services); Seth Ginns (cross-vertical liquid investing); David Pakman (NFTs, consumer, infrastructure) and Chris Perkins (financial convergence, tokenization, CeFi.) The Investment team includes Vangelis Andrikopolous, Austin Barack, Einar Braathen, Evan Feng, Christian Murray, Rishin Sharma and Isaiah Washington. Areas of expertise include ZK/ML/AI; DeFi; Layer 2s; consumer services, gaming, NFTs and DAOs; infrastructure including nodes, security, analytics, middleware, interoperability and scalability, and emerging markets.

2023 has also been a year of exciting organizational developments and growth for CoinFund, further evidenced by its recent appointments of Dilveer Vahali as Head of Venture Legal, Jules Mossler as Head of Marketing & Communications and Jenna Pilgrim as Head of Platform. The firm continues to seek talented investors; applicants may visit the CoinFund job board for more information on CoinFund and portfolio company roles.

The close of Seed IV comes after the recent announcement of CESR, the composite ether staking rate, announced by CoinFund in collaboration with CoinDesk Indices. CESR is a global floating rate benchmark derived from the daily transaction fees and staking rewards emitted from the Ethereum Proof of Stake (PoS) blockchain, enabling the proliferation of loans, bonds, futures, swaps, other derivative products and financial instruments that reference the index. By playing a fundamental role in the building of the web3 economy, CESR is a key example of CoinFund’s continued investment in and support for the growth and maturity of web3 and its mainstream convergence.