Dragonfly Capital raises $650 million for its third crypto-focused fund

Dragonfly, the crypto investment firm led by Haseeb Qureshi and Tom Schmidt, unveiled a new fund backed by $650 million in commitments. Among backers are Tiger Global and KKR as well as multiple unnamed university endowments.

Dragonfly’s new fund was announced amid a flurry of new investment fund launches across the industry. Some of these new initiatives have come from the likes of Bain Capital, Electric Capital, and a16z. The new fund follows the close of Dragonfly’s Ventures II fund last year.

Dragonfly’s Qureshi said that the new fund will target the new wave of crypto entrepreneurs building in Web3 and more nascent corners of the market.

“This new generation of entrepreneurs has lots of energy and excitement about the decentralized future,” he said.

These founders, according to Qureshi, need their investors to participate in token economics, go-to-market, product strategy, and hiring.

“That’s why Dragonfly is often the first port of call for these entrepreneurs – unlike many of the generalist VCs, we’ve been doing this for many years now, we’ve backed many of the generational protocols and companies in this space, and we’ve seen the whole journey from seed to multi-billion-dollar outcomes,” Qureshi added.

As for Dragonfly, Qureshi said that the firm has a crypto-native team that “understands how these protocols work.”

Dragonfly Capital was founded in 2018 by Bo Feng, an established venture capitalist with over 20 years of experience, and Alexander Pack, a venture capitalist who managed crypto investments and funding at Bain Capital Ventures.

To date, the Cayman Island-based corporation has invested in almost 60 companies, including blockchains like Terra and Near and financial services like Matrixport and Paradigm, through its previous funds launched in 2018 and 2021 for $100 million and $225 million, respectively.

It is often positioned at the forefront of the industry’s most prominent venture raises, including Avalanche’s $12 million private token sale in June 2020, Dune Analytics’ $2 million seed round in September 2020, and DYDX’s $10 million Series A in October 2018, among others.

Further, Dragonfly plans to focus its investments across all stages of blockchain and crypto-native companies, protocols, and tokens.

Image source: https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/27/crypto-focused-dragonfly-capital-launches-650m-third-fund/