Crypto investments firm Valkyrie is moving into venture capital with a planned $30 million venture capital fund that will bet heavily on early-stage startups in Israel.
To helm its effort, Valkyrie has brought on a veteran of Israel’s VC scene: Lluis Pedragosa, founder and former partner of cybersecurity-oriented Israeli VC Team8.
The Spainard told CoinDesk that Israel’s crypto startup scene has been languishing in a “vacuum” and that despite the country’s surging tech entrepreneur landscape, funders, founders and builders were all avoiding crypto. He attributed this to the bad taste left by ICO scams of 2017 and 2018.
“But that has changed in the past 12 to 18 months, with more and more entrepreneurs jumping on the blockchain wagon,” Pedragosa said. Valkyrie’s own VC wing plans to join the fray.
It will do so by throwing relatively small checks ($250,000 to $1 million, he said) at behind-the-scenes infrastructure companies that make crypto businesses run smoothly. He specifically named security and authentication, data management, networking and storage – “all of the technological rails that decentralized applications will need in order to be built.”
Pedragosa said Valkyrie has already invested in a Web3 team called “Bunches” that’s building a messaging platform for wallets. A team member for Bunches did not respond to a Twitter message sent by CoinDesk.
Beyond just runway, Pedragosa said Valkyrie will provide Israeli teams with an even more…
