Cryptocurrency venture capital firm Paradigm has raised $1.2 billion, its third and fourth venture fund overall, to invest in the “technology frontier,” company founder Matt Huang announced Wednesday.
For Paradigm, the technological frontier extends beyond the roots of crypto investing. The fund is expected to expand its investments into areas such as robotics and AI. This isn't a surprising move considering how hot the AI market has been over the past few years, but cryptocurrencies are facing challenges.
Paradigm is not abandoning cryptocurrencies completely, according to a blog post written by Hwang and the firm's managing partner Alana Palmedo. The company will continue to “invest in cryptocurrencies and reinvent markets and financial systems,” they wrote, and “continue to research and build industries from blockchain tools (Foundry, Reth) to agent tools (Centaur) to security work (EVMbench, collaboration with OpenAI) to accelerate the industry.”
But AI and robotics are also priorities. “There's too much going on right now that we can't ignore it,” Palmedo said in an interview with Bloomberg.
Paradigm’s Fund III has already made several investments, including drone delivery company Zipline and space startup True Anomaly.
The company was founded in 2018 by former Sequoia partner Huang and crypto exchange Coinbase co-founder Fred Arsam and filed for funding earlier this year, according to SEC filings. The funding, reported in February by the Wall Street Journal, is slightly less than the $1.5 billion the company was aiming to raise.