Venture Capital Firm CoinFund Raises $158 Million to Drive Innovation in Early-Stage Crypto and AI Companies

The crypto-focused venture capital firm CoinFund has closed a fundraising round for its latest VC fund, the CoinFund Seed IV Fund, after raising $158 million from investors.

The investors in the new fund are a combination of family offices, institutional investors and high-net worth individuals, an announcement from CoinFund said.

The announcement added that the amount raised far exceeded its initial fundraising goal of $125 million, despite a general slump in the market for VC investing.

“The Fund will support pre-seed and seed stage investments in new and ambitious founding teams across the web3 ecosystem,” the announcement said.

Investments made by the new fund will focus on “thoughtful, long-term” projects that have a “clear, yet non-consensus view of how next generation applications will be built on web3 rails.”

In a Twitter thread, the New York-based VC firm admitted that current environment for crypto projects is “tough,” with both foundational technical challenges to solve and an “evolving regulatory” landscape to operate in.

“It’s a time for grit and building for the long-term,” CoinFund said.

In the last month, CoinFund has made multi-million dollar investments in projects related to artificial intelligence (AI), layer 1 blockchains, and blockchain-based financial services.

Among these was an investment into Giza, an AI platform for smart contracts and web3 protocols, and the Cosmos-based smart contract platform Neutron.

More bullish than ever

Commenting on the milestone, CoinFund’s CEO and Co-Founder, Jake Brukhman, thanked his investors for the “deep confidence” they have expressed in his firm, despite the crypto bear market.

“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,” Brukhman said, while adding:

“CoinFund is proud to identify and back emergent teams and technologies before they trend.”