Venture capital firms have been plunking down millions of dollars in funding on startups pitching blockchain tech, the innovative accounting ledgers that underpin cryptocurrencies and power nifty, distributed databases.
As interest in all things crypto heats up, initial coin offerings—a crowdsourced way for crypto projects to raise money—have become all the rage, allowing fledgling projects to raise ample funds without needing institutional backers. Despite the democratizing trend, VC firms are on track to ink 77 traditional deals with blockchain startups by year’s end—more than any year prior.
So far, VC firms have struck 59 deals this year, already exceeding the 57 signed last year.
Now you can see where the biggest brand name investors’ purses intersect. CB Insights, a market research firm that tracks the venture capital industry, mapped out the relationships between some of the most prestigious VC dealmakers in a new report previewed exclusively with Coins2Day.
Many of the firms will be familiar to people who follow the money in Silicon Valley and beyond: Sequoia Capital, Union Square Ventures, and Andreessen Horowitz among them. The diagram below reveals which traditional equity deals these firms have in common.
Get Data Sheet, Coins2Day ’s technology newsletter
Several trends become clear as you peruse the ties. Andreessen Horowitz likes to invest alongside Union Square Ventures, as seen in joint fundings in Coinbase, the most well-known crypto broker, OpenBazaar, a decentralized online marketplace, and Mediachain, a song royalty tracker since acquired by Spotify. Sequoia, meanwhile, places bets more sparingly, backing only Bitmain Technologies, a Bitcoin miner—though the firm has also contributed non-equity investment funding to hedge funds like Polychain and Metastable as well as ICO-backed projects like FileCoin.
Note that the biggest-name investors included above are not necessarily the biggest investors in blockchain tech. Digital Currency Group, an investment firm led by Barry Silbert, founder of SecondMarket (an exchange for private company stock) and alumni of Coins2Day’s 40 Under 40 list, leads the pack with more than 100 investments in roughly 75 blockchain companies. Blockchain Capital lands in the runner-up spot, with Draper Associates placing third in terms of number of deals.
Check out the CB Insights report for more interesting blockchain VC tidbits. And tune into this October 26 webinar, where CB Insights analyst Arieh Levi, the report’s author, and I will provide a rundown of the blockchain landscape as well as field questions from attendees.
Correction 10/23/17: This post and accompanying graphic have been updated to reflect the relationships of several VC firms and their investments in blockchain startups. Sequoia Capital was not an investor in the now defunct company Koinify. And while Andreessen Horowitz and Union Square Ventures are both limited partners in the hedge fund Polychain Capital, only the latter is an equity investor.
