MetaWeb Ventures raises $30 million for a construction-focused blockchain fund

MetaWeb Ventures, a global venture capital firm focused on pre- and seed investments in crypto startups, announced on Thursday the launch of its first fund (Fund I), with total capital commitments of $30 million.

Limited partners (LPs) of the fund include NEAR Foundation, Sequoia Capital, Dragonfly Capital, GSR Markets, Octopus Network, SevenX, Mentha Partners, as well as notable entrepreneurs such as NEAR’s co-founder Illia Polosukhin, Matrix China’s co-founder Bo Shao, Alchemy Pay’s founder Shawn Shi , Dodo co-founder Mark Wang, and more, MetaWeb said in a statement.

MetaWeb aims to create outsized returns by investing in highly innovative projects and builders that can unlock the mainstream adoption of blockchain for billions of users.

“We founded MetaWeb to support future Web3 leaders who will disrupt the world through blockchain. As former entrepreneurs, we will work side by side with the entrepreneurs throughout their journey,” said Amos Zhang, Managing Partner of MetaWeb Ventures.

The entire MetaWeb team is deeply embedded in the blockchain developer ecosystem and is able to support founders in the earliest stages. The fund will primarily invest in the verticals decentralized social media, DeFi, games, infrastructure and DAO. A second fund (fund II) will follow in 2023.

MetaWeb is focused on supporting developers and researchers who are building the future of Web3.

The fund has been operating in stealth mode for the past few months and has already invested in 33 start-ups. Most notably, MetaWeb invested in Orderly, Niche, CornerstoneDAO, Sender Wallet, Kino and Play3.

The firm is led by crypto veterans Zhang and Dani Osorio. Zhang is a serial entrepreneur who has run start-ups in blockchain and software as a service (SaaS) with several successful exits.

Before joining MetaWeb, he ran Global Marketing and was Genera Manager for Asia at NEAR Protocol.

Osorio has spent over 15 years at high-growth startups; prior to MetaWeb, she co-founded a non-fungible token (NFT) Infrastructure startup, led the Developer Ecosystem at NEAR Protocol, and was a Director at Infura/Consensys.

She volunteers as content manager at the crypto festival EthDenver, as well as sits on the boards of SporkDAO and CypherPunk Guild.

“At its core, MetaWeb is unique in that we are all builders who also invest – we have direct access to early stage projects as we can provide a very special kind of support to our founders,” said Osorio.

With deep domain expertise in both blockchain technology and the NEAR protocol, MetaWeb was created as NEAR’s first ecosystem fund. That vision aligned with a multi-chain future, so MetaWeb began investing in the best platforms and applications across additional protocols, including Ethereum, Aurora, Cosmos and more.

Today, MetaWeb Ventures has a team of 9 in New York, Denver, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Hong Kong and Lisbon. This is the first venture fund.

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