Alexis Ohanian – co-founder of Reddit – recently raised $500 million for his venture capital firm 776 Management LLC. He said that the new funds will primarily be used to “double down” on investment in crypto startups.
As reported by Wall Street Journal, Ohanian showed confidence in the growing entrepreneurial and software activity in crypto. As such, the company has 40% of its current funds in the sector, while the remainder goes towards others like space exploration, climate, and food.
“It will be the majority of the portfolio by the end of this year,” Mr. Ohanian said regarding the firm’s crypto investments.
The firm’s new capital goes towards two new funds. One is the $300 million 776 Fund II, formed to support early stage crypto startups prior and leading to Seed A funding. The other is the $200 million Arete Fund I, focused on companies with more mature growth hosting larger Series A and B funding rounds.
One of the company’s primary focuses is to make women a larger part of the crypto market. According to a study from CNBC in August, there are twice as many male cryptocurrency investors as female ones.
It would also like to simplify use of crypto based products, to the point that customers need not even know they’re interacting with blockchain technology. Current industry examples of this lie in crypto-linked credit and debit cards, which allow merchants to accept crypto payments without even knowing it.
Last year, Ohanian’s firm partnered with Solana Labs to invest $100 million in decentralized social media. He believes Solana’s “high performance blockchain” could help make the Web 3 dream reality – combining Web 2 features with Web 1 user ownership and control. A month later, he doubled down on a very similar initiative with Polygon for $200 million.
The investor has plenty of experience in the cryptocurrency space already, having been a seed investor in Coinbase, Opendoor, and Patreon. Naturally, his experience with Reddit dating back over 15 years makes Web 3 a natural combination of both interests.
In June, Ohanian claimed to own “a lot” of ETH, believing it to have the most potential in the crypto ecosystem.