Introducing Room40 Ventures, an early-stage fund focused on crypto and the ventures strategy for Room40, a crossover crypto investment firm. Our mission is to partner with founders catalyzing the next wave of web3 adoption. If you’re ready to build, we’d love to chat.
Over the past few years, crypto natives around the world have been meeting in online communities building parallel systems for infrastructure, finance, and culture. These systems have grown exponentially in value. They allowed communities to form to catalyze change. And in an unprecedented period of market volatility, these systems proved resilient when centralized models failed.
We believe this is just the beginning.
Decentralized crypto protocols are in the first inning of adoption with profound implications for democratizing financial products and enabling new ownership models for the internet. As the dust settles from a euphoric period of experimentation, the validation of crypto is clear: blockchain protocols have proven their potential, creating a trillion dollars of value in the process.
The next trillion of value creation requires new crypto adopters to participate in open networks powering modern financial rails, personalized commerce, resilient infrastructure, and more. With each new use case comes builders unfamiliar with crypto-focused programming languages, and new stakeholders unfamiliar with seed phrases and digital governance. To welcome this next wave, the ecosystem will look for ways to unlock frictionless user experiences and drive verticalization. New bridges will need to be built, not only between blockchains, but also between on-chain protocols and their off-chain counterparts.
Differing from the typical technology adoption curve, crypto protocols take a different path of going from private to public markets. Crypto protocols use tokens to enable stakeholders – users, builders, and investors – to accrue ownership and governance commensurate with their roles in growing the network. Jumpstarting these network effects results in earlier liquidity for tokens, which often debut in public markets within 2 years of founding compared to 10 years for equity-funded startups. This means that in addition to the typical course of scaling early stage startups, protocol founders must also assume the roles of effective token allocation (tokenomics) to drive network growth, and productive engagement with public market participants.
This paradigm demands a new playbook for how firms invest and partner with crypto-native startups. An investment firm purpose-built for crypto requires expertise in (1) capital markets, to identify investment opportunities across stage and liquidity and help founders navigate public markets; (2) tokenomics, to align participant incentives for sustainable network growth and governance, and (3) bridging web2 and web3 (bi-directionally), as on- and off-chain organizations converge in domains like finance, commerce, and beyond.
We are thrilled to formally announce Room40, a crossover investment firm focused on crypto. Room40’s structure enables us to fully serve builders across their various stages of scaling. Room40 Ventures is our early-stage venture fund: our mission is to partner with best-in-class founders leveraging crypto, whether they are building protocols or scaling companies powered by blockchain. Room40 Capital, a multi-strategy liquid fund, seeks to deliver uncorrelated risk-adjusted returns in public crypto markets and actively partner with liquid token protocols.
Our team consists of builders and investors with experience across the lifecycle of technology firms and financial markets. Our ventures team has worked closely with founders from pre-idea (and pre-token launch) to post-IPO, deploying billions of capital in the process. Our liquid team is armed with institutional experience at top-tier hedge funds, as well as crypto-native experience as early community members of blue chip crypto protocols.
The Room40 name is inspired by a diverse group of British codebreakers from World War I that paved the way for Alan Turing’s Bletchley Park team that decrypted Enigma during World War II. This team of academics, strategists, and public servants harnessed technology to change the course of history. Our mission at Room40 is to partner with builders unlocking the next wave of innovation through crypto by developing tomorrow’s user experience, tomorrow’s economic design, and tomorrow’s financial operating system. Join us in this next chapter.
