Backed by the LVMH group, the venture capital firm Agla Ventures announces the creation of a fund dedicated to Web3. Endowed with approximately 100 million euros, it will support start-ups focused on fintech, blockchain and digital assets.
The venture capital (VC) company Aglaé Ventures, owned by Bernard Arnault’s LVMH group, announces the creation of a fund dedicated to web3 and more specifically to investment in cryptocurrency startups. The amount has not yet been specified but several people familiar with the matter confirmed to The Blockthe leading cryptocurrency media that the fund will be between €100 million and €110 million in size.
Based in Paris, with offices in New York and San Francisco, this investment fund manager is backed by Groupe Arnault, the majority shareholder of luxury leader LVMH. The company regularly invests between €100,000 and €100 million in a variety of businesses and high-growth technology companies at all stages of their development. Supported companies include Airbnb, Algolia, Ankorstore, Back Market, Databricks, Lyft, Netflix, Slack, Spotify and more. Aglaé Ventures focuses on a very specific type of company: the latter offer either SaaS software, content platforms (social networks, communication platform, streaming), or even development and application tools.
VCs take on cryptos
The creation of this fund within the VC company follows two recruitments by Aglaé Ventures. Vanessa Grellet, former CoinFund executive, and Jordan Lazaro Gustave, former COO of Aave, are coming to strengthen the teams and lead cryptocurrency investments, reports The Block. Similar initiatives have emerged in Europe and more widely internationally. Last June, the blockchain dedicated to NFTs and the Ethereum blockchain, Immutable X, announced the launch of a $500 million development fund. A few days later, Prime Trust, which provides creators of fintech and digital assets with financial infrastructure, announced that it had raised over $100 million.
The French nugget Ledger has followed suit by joining forces with the VC fund Cathay Innovation to open a fund called Ledger Cathay Capital, endowed with 100 million euros. On the side of European VC companies, we can notably mention the London company Blossom Capital which has dedicated a third of its fund of 432 million dollars to cryptocurrency companies. In Berlin, seed fund Cherry Ventures launched a $34 million fund to target crypto start-ups. On the other side of the Atlantic, investors do not play in the same court but pursue the same objective. At the beginning of the year, Sequoia Capital even created an industry-specific fund – Sequoia Crypto Fund – endowed with 500 to 600 million dollars.