Lightspeed Launches Funds Totaling $7B, Plus New Blockchain Venture

Venture capital firm Lightspeed Venture Partners has announced three U.S. funds totaling $6.6 billion, plus a $500 million India-based early-stage fund, bringing the firm’s assets under management to $18 billion.

And it also announced Lightspeed Faction, an independent team focused on backing early-stage blockchain infrastructure projects.

Lightspeed has partnered with Sam Harrison, co-founder of Blockchain.com’s venture arm (where he remains a venture partner), and Banafsheh Fathieh, an internet and blockchain investor formerly with Prosus Ventures.

The two companies will operate as separate investors, but will share resources.

The firm said that the independent crypto-native team “is an experienced group of blockchain veterans that collaborates with the Lightspeed global platform to meet exceptional founders wherever they reside.”

 Sam Harrison, Managing Partner, and Banafsheh Fathieh, General Partner of Lightspeed Faction said: “Blockchains have enabled new use cases that we believe will supplant notable legacy systems. Faction’s joint-venture with Lightspeed pairs a crypto-native team with the company-scaling experience of the Lightspeed platform.”

Lightspeed has raised some 60% more than it did in its last funding round, which is seen as a vote of confidence in the firm during the current market conditions

Funds for crypto businesses falls

According to research by PitchBook, funding to private crypto companies fell to its lowest annual level in the April to June quarter.

Robert Le, a fintech analyst at PitchBook, told Bloomberg: “Even though the crypto market started slowing down in Nov, Dec, those deals were already in discussion, so they closed in the first quarter.”

In quarter one, 2022, crypto companies received a record $9.85 billion in funding compared to $6.76 billion in quarter two.

“Everyone is really hesitant on closing deals right now,” Le said.

However, the figures are an improvement when compared to the investment numbers for 2021.

According to Dove Metrics, the total funding for May was $4.219 billion. While that figure was down 38.2% month-on-month against April investments of $6.829 billion, funding was up 97.8% year-on-year.

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