New York City’s Interplay Raises $10M for New Blockchain Fund – TechCrunch

We’ve seen a number of new web3-focused venture fund launches in the past month from large traditional VCs including Lightspeed and smaller, crypto-native firms like Valkyrie. Although crypto startups have had a tougher time attracting capital, venture firms appear to be raising money from investors, perhaps preparing to scoop up stakes in startups at relatively cheap prices if market conditions worsen.

Now New York City-based Interplay, which says it services 15% of venture-backed companies in the US, is launching its own dedicated blockchain fund that will invest in startups, tokens, special situations and other early-stage strategies. web3. The firm is targeting a $10 million raise and is currently in talks with investors, founder and managing partner Mark Peter Davis told TechCrunch in an exclusive interview.

Interplay’s current offerings include a venture capital arm that houses two early-stage funds, a foundry that helps build companies from scratch, an incubator to support existing companies and a family office, Davis said. The firm is launching Interplay Blockchain as a standalone vertical separately from its existing venture capital arm, which invests in seed to Series B companies across the technology sector, he added.

While this launch marks Interplay’s first dedicated foray into the web3 space, the venture capital arm of Coinbase participated in its Series A round and has helped incubate an insurance product for the crypto space, according to Davis.

“We’ve just continued to look at random opportunities that don’t quite fit into our other programs that we’re excited about, and now we have a program to engage them,” Davis said of the firm’s crypto ambitions.

The firm is bringing in Brett Palatiello, a quantitative trader who most recently led systematic macro and equity research at Ridgewood Analytica, to lead Interplay Blockchain Fund I alongside Davis and Interplay partner Kevin Tung.

Palatiello said that within web3, he is excited about blockchain interoperability as well as identity solutions as sub-sectors for investment.

“If we look at the internet as it is now, think of it as walking through a house with some doors locked and you can open them. I imagine the metaverse to be a fluid situation – imagine swimming around in the ocean where you carries your identity or information with you in a seamless way. So essentially it’s just a wide open ecosystem where people can move around and build things on top of each other, so I think identity is one of those things that needs to happen,” Palatiello said.

As for what makes Interplay’s fund stand out in a crowded wave of crypto venture funds, Palatiello emphasized the team’s interdisciplinary background.

“I was a developer, and I was also very involved in the financial side of things, and I have a heavy background in finance … having that background will certainly help us communicate with developers who themselves have their own languages, Palatiello said.

“We [also] have Kevin and Mark, who are very strategy oriented. One of the things that is lacking in this area is product and strategy oriented people, he added. “You have a lot of developers building very, very interesting technologies — it’s about making these things consumer-facing and putting them into practice.”