![]() Should Murphy’s recruitment be confirmed it would signal a significant expansion of a Lightspeed London “office,” and confirmation that the VC is doubling down in the region. firm as its first partner in London the following September, according to LinkedIn. TechCrunch first heard rumors that the Menlo Park-based VC was recruiting a partner in London as far back as August in 2019. Meanwhile, the fact that Lightspeed is formally putting more people on the ground in Europe should come as no surprise to close watchers of the ecosystem here. He also holds a BS in Computer Engineering from Virginia Tech and an MBA from The IE Business School in Spain, according to the Northzone website. Before that, he held several roles at Microsoft in the U.S., U.K. (Notably, Murphy helped launch Giphy in the U.S., which Lightspeed ended up backing and later sold to Facebook for $400 million). He also built and invested in various companies at startup studio Betaworks. To this end, Berry Health, a several- months-old Ghanaian startup, is throwing its hat into the ring, like many other startups, off the back of a 1.6 million pre-seed round co-led by U.S.-based. Prior to VC, Murphy co-founded Dots, the mobile games company in New York. “If next year is bad, we’ll still be investing, continuing to deploy and doing what we do with a 10-year time horizon,” he said.VCs are chasing Hopin upwards of $5-6B valuation Harrison feels it’s not about timing the market, because the investments they make are a “10-year thing not a one- to two-year thing.” ![]() “Markets go up and down we look at it for 20 seconds of our day, but the underlying fundamental conviction is there, and there’s an open door here.” It’s better than when the market is extremely hot…This is the time we want to be most active while others are questioning it.”Īlthough the crypto market is down from all-time highs, Fathieh said they want to focus on the long term. “We’ve been investing through a few cycles, so it’s a good time to invest. A Lightspeed VC advises companies to nail down a blockchain strategy within the next 2 years: I talk about it with any startup I consider investing in. “It’s clearly a time where a lot of generalist capital has left the space,” Harrison said. It is also in a joint “hybrid structure” venture with Lightspeed Venture Partners so it can leverage the venture firm’s platform, Harrison said.īoth Fathieh and Harrison see the current crypto market conditions as a perfect environment to deploy in. The firm is run by people who previously worked at crypto companies like Coinbase, and Amber Group, among other entities. Its average check size is in a “sweet spot” of about $5 to $10 million, which usually gives the firm a top spot as lead investor, Harrison said. “But also not so big that it’s difficult to deploy.”įathieh said the firm doesn’t have “a hard and fast rule for check size or ownership,” and added that it invests in either tokens or equity. “It’s being big enough to matter,” Harrison added. ![]() “If we went smaller than that, it’s difficult to do, because then you don’t have the dry powder to support these companies, especially the high-profile ones with the greater capital needs.” The firm wants to be large enough to lead seed rounds and early Series As, and at the same time “essentially have full control when it comes to working with companies” to help them scale and be a valuable partner, Harrison said. “When fund sizes decline, it’s difficult to step in as a syndicate or lead.” “We wanted to make sure we were always flexible with capital,” Fathieh said. They also raised a small portion of capital from family offices and friends. He added that the fund’s LPs are mostly institutional investors and some strategic investors. “We felt like anywhere from $250 million to $350 million made sense,” Harrison said. The fund originally set out to raise $250 million, but ended up with 14% more than its target. “The early stage is where we see the greatest amount of opportunity.” It’s a lot of trading use cases or capturing the ethos of ‘this could be an emerging asset class.’ But crypto, as a technology trend, is relatively young,” Fathieh said. “On the maturity arc, most of what you see at the growth stage speaks to crypto as an asset class. The deployment period will be on a roughly three-year schedule, but may vary depending on the investment environment, Banafsheh Fathieh, a general partner at the firm, said. Before launching publicly, the fund had invested about 20% of its capital in a handful of projects, Samuel Harrison, managing partner at Faction, said. ![]() The firm has launched its inaugural $285 million fund, its co-founders exclusively told TechCrunch.įaction will focus mainly on early-stage blockchain projects raising seed or Series A rounds. As the crypto market continues to slog through a fundraising winter, Faction Ventures, a blockchain-focused venture capital firm, is betting big on the space.
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