blockworks.co
The former founding managing partner of ConsenSys Ventures has revealed a fund she created that will invest in companies and tokens across the blockchain space, including DeFi and NFTs.
The Delta Blockchain Fund aims to be a “strategic partner” for entrepreneurs early in their journey to scale their businesses, Kavita Gupta told Blockworks in an interview.
The fund, which is set to invest in equity and tokens, will be looking at interoperable scalability solutions, such as Nahmii, which Gupta noted is focused on decentralized finance as well as going interchain with scalability solutions.
“Decentralized identity, computation and storage are the three really big targets for me, and of course DeFi and NFTs and the institutional adoption of both,” she said. “It’s not a DeFi fund or this fund or that fund. We are looking at anything and everything we find on blockchain, but these are five or six sectors that I’m super excited about.”
Building the fund
Gupta worked at blockchain software technology company ConsenSys from 2017 to 2019 and later became a visiting scholar and lecturer at Stanford University. She has spent the last couple years doing growth-stage special purpose vehicles, or SPV, deals, as well as angel investing.
“Finally, this year I was getting more and more interested in going back to the early-stage investments,” she said.
Gupta is launching the fund with Templum co-founder Vincent Molinari and Daniel Novy, a fellow former ConsenSys employee who had previously founded an exchange in Brazil called Basebit.
“One of the reasons I really wanted Vince on board is I do see there are very, very few early-stage investment funds who can provide a deep regulatory experience of DeFi builders and NFT builders,” Gupta explained.
Gupta added that Novy brings a technical diligence perspective as venture partner of the fund. Novy took a sabbatical from ConsenSys in 2019 but never went back, he said in a Twitter post Tuesday. For the last two years he has been making angel investments in Brazil.
“So, when [Kavita] invited me to help her on a new venture … that was a no-brainer,” he tweeted. “First because of who she is and second because that’s something I found out I love doing.”
Who’s invested?
Gupta had planned for a $10 million initial raise for the Delta Blockchain Fund, which she expected to grow to $50 million. But the initial raise was oversubscribed to $30 million, and she now expects the fund to reach $100 million.
Investors in Gupta’s fund include Polygon Co-founder and COO Sandeep Nailwal, Richard Ma, co-founder and CEO of Quantstamp, and Samyak Jain, co-founder and CTO of InstaDApp. These executives and others, from countries across the world, are acting as advisers to the fund, she added.
“There is so much money in the space, I just didn’t want money,” Gupta said. “What I really wanted was how strategically I have LPs who come with the potential to really build these companies … and also give them global access.”
The new fund comes as an all-time high of $17 billion had been invested into crypto projects in 2021, as of mid-June. Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz announced a $2.2 billion crypto fund that month, and more recently, private equity firm 10T Holdings has raised $750 million for its first two growth equity funds focused on digital asset companies.
Franklin Templeton, a $1.5 trillion asset manager, has so far raised $10 million for a blockchain fund, according to a regulatory filing filed last week.
But Gupta noted that her track record in the blockchain ecosystem, such as being an investor in BlockFi, as well her team and investors, differentiates the Delta Blockchain Fund from others.
“We are bringing people together, with upcoming founders and people who have been through this ecosystem for very long, have built multi-billion-dollar companies and understand this and can help these founders,” Gupta said. “Most other funds today cannot do that.”
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