Greenfield One founders Jascha Samadi and Sebastian Blum. Image: Dominik Tryba/Greenfield One
Berlin-based VC firm Greenfield One will invest in European projects creating tech for Web 3.0.
Crypto-focused VC firm Greenfield One has just announced the closure of a $160m fund for European crypto start-ups – its largest fund yet and one of Europe’s largest funds in the crypto space.
Raised from private investors in less than four months, the new Greenfield One fund will be used to invest in projects and developer teams in Europe working towards creating a more open, decentralised web, known as Web 3.0.
Greenfield One’s fund has already been used to make initial investments in early-stage projects such as governance lending protocol Paladin, decentralised finance protocol Brink, and Darkblock, which has developed a protocol for rights management of non-fungible tokens (NFTs), among others.
The fund was backed by existing investors including Bertelsmann Investments and family offices such as Lennertz & Co from Hamburg. They were joined by some new backers from sectors such as finance and telecommunications.
These include telecommunications group Swisscom, CommerzVentures, Galaxy Vision Hill, a business unit of Mike Novogratz’s Galaxy Digital, and the fund of funds Aldea Ventures. All new and existing investors are from the private sector.
Sebastian Blum, co-founder and partner at Greenfield One, said that the German firm’s focus on projects building an open web comes at a time when Web 3.0 has “evolved out of its niche” and the pace of innovation is high.
“We are very happy about the strong growth of the investment volume in our new fund, in which previous backers but also more and more institutional investors are getting involved in order to profit from the innovations in the crypto market,” he said.
The Berlin-based crypto fund has invested in projects such as 1inch Network, a decentralised finance aggregator. It was also the first institutional investor to invest in Sovryn and was an early investor in Celo – the public blockchain network that attracted investors such as Deutsche Telekom earlier this year.
Greenfield One was founded in 2018 by Blum and serial founder Jascha Samadi. Its first fund was launched in early 2019 and its third fund, which is registered with Germany’s financial supervisor BaFin, is expected to comprise around 35 investments.
Last week, San Francisco-based Paradigm launched what is said to be the largest crypto fund ever raised. The crypto-focused VC revealed its $2.5bn fund to back the “next generation of crypto companies and protocols”.
It beats the $2.2bn fund launched by Silicon Valley heavyweight Andreessen Horowitz earlier this year for investing in crypto networks, as part of its broader crypto push.
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