blockworks.co
Former executives at CoinFund and Aave have joined a venture capitalist firm seeking to expand its investments in Web3.
Vanessa Grellet, who joined blockchain-focused investment firm CoinFund in May 2021, is now a managing partner at Aglaé Ventures. Grellet will continue her relationship with CoinFund as an adviser.
She joined Aglaé Ventures with Jordan Lazaro Gustave, who was a founding member of FlamingoDAO and previously served as chief operating officer of liquidity protocol Aave.
The venture capital firm, which has bases in Paris, New York and San Francisco, invests in asset-light activities and growing tech companies at all stages. These include marketplaces, software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies, content platforms, developer and application tools, and digital-native brands.
Aglaé has invested in Airbnb, Lyft, Netflix, Slack and Spotify. Its investments range from 100,000 euros to 100 million euros. The company is backed by Agache (formerly Groupe Arnault), the controlling shareholder of luxury goods giant Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton (LVMH).
“It’s been a very successful VC in Web2, but they were seeing a lot of things coming in Web3 and wanted to hire someone who is a specialist to manage that portion of their investments,” Grellet told Blockworks.
Grellet and Gustave will target investments in four sectors: decentralized and centralized finance, web3 infrastructure, layer-1 and layer-2 scalability, and the creator economy.
“We’ll both have a lot of operational experience to help the founders and get them from zero to one,” Grellet said.
Grellet was hired last year “to cement CoinFund as one of the most hands-on partners to early-stage teams building blockchain technology products.”
CoinFund President Christopher Perkins told Blockworks that Grellet will continue to work with the company in an advisory role. No one person will replace Grellet in her role as head of portfolio growth, as CoinFund is restructuring the team.
The investment firm is “in build mode,” Perkins added, noting that it is seeking to bolster its post-investment management strategy by hiring across marketing and communications, talent acquisition and technical support.
Before CoinFund, Grellet spent four years as an executive director at ConsenSys, where she focused on driving adoption for Ethereum, strategic initiatives, alliances and channels. While there, she worked with LVMH teams on their AURA project, which aimed to serve the luxury industry with product tracking and tracing services based on Ethereum blockchain technology.
Grellet has also worked at PwC and as a corporate strategy executive at the New York Stock Exchange.