Pantera Capital Raised More Than Double Its Initial $600M Blockchain Funding Target

Pantera Capital, an American blockchain funding firm, is ready to close a $1.3 billion funding round. This is the company’s first blockchain fund since starting crypto-related operations in 2013, according to CEO Dan Morehead.

Pantera Capital has been operating since 2003, helping startups by providing them investments in exchange for fees to return to the investors. 

Pantera Capital announced the blockchain funding round in June 2021 with an initial target of $600 million. According to the firm’s May conference call, investors have funded over a billion dollars until last month. 

Although the exact date for closing the company’s first blockchain funding round was not announced, Morehead expects, per a conference call on April 12, “it’s gonna be about $1.3 billion and over the next three or four weeks, and as some of the big institutions that have very detailed due diligence processes wrap up, we will be done with that fund.”

Bigger plans incoming

The company is also planning for another blockchain funding round in 2023, says Pantera Capital’s director of portfolio development, Franklin Bi. The company even has plans for a larger, diverse and “longer-investment-period growth-stage fund, say in 2024,” says Morehead.

The main topic for the latest investors’ call was Pantera Capital’s new $200 million “Select Fund.” These investments will be used to help blockchain-related startups that are “more mature, revenue-generating companies than our typical Seed and Series A venture investments,” per the CEO.

According to Pantera Capital’s Blockchain Letter, three crypto firms have already been selected, with two of them marked as confidential. The startups to be funded with the “Select Fund” are Amber, a crypto gateway and financial services provider, a confidential Indian crypto exchange and a secret non-fungible token (NFT) domain provider.

“For the first time in our nine years, we have three very compelling growth-stage deals locked in all at the same time. That catalyzed us to offer a special fund to help Limited Partners gain exposure to these growth-stage deals plus seven to nine more we will invest in over the next year,” reads the letter.
This is Pantera Capital’s most important round to date, however, not the first. Last year, the asset management firm helped raise $6 million for an Indonesian crypto exchange with some participation from Coinbase Ventures and Intudo Ventures, among other companies.

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