The fund will make bets in the decentralised (DeFi) finance, infrastructure and gaming space and cut cheques of $200,000-$500,000.
The fund’s managing partner and founder, Sachin Jain, who cofounded Amesten Asset, has in the past invested in over 18 startups, including Delta Exchange, Unmarshal, Easyfi, Nord finance, and Kalamint.
Jain’s initial investments yielded healthy exits, going up to an internal rate of return of 480%.
Amesten Asset is a crypto portfolio management service for high net-worth individuals and institutions.
“Web3 is a trending idea right now and there can be a lot of hype. But there are a handful of products which are actually doing work on a good level that will make a difference tomorrow,” Jain said.
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Most of the crypto ecosystem, apart from a few Non-Fungible Token (NFT) marketplaces and crypto exchanges, are still in its infancy in terms of deal making, he said.
“Gaming is a very important area for us,” Jain said. “There are a lot of pre-product market fit startups in the ecosystem that are more of an idea at this point; most of them are still at the early stages of attracting the first set of users,” he added.
Several funds are making early-stage bets in the Web3 ecosystem in India.
Among the notable early-stage deals, Ethereum Push Notification Service (EPNS) raised $10.1 million (about Rs 76 crore), while Stader Labs, a cryptocurrency staking management platform, raised $12.5 million in January.
International crypto venture funds are also increasingly investing in the region.
Coinbase Ventures, the investment arm of Coinbase, partnered with Indian incubator, Buidlers Tribe, to invest up to $1 million from Coinbase Ventures.
FTX Ventures, the corporate venture arm of crypto exchange FTX which has a corpus of $2 billion, partnered with SuperteamDao and launched FTX Superteam.
Indian founders building on the Solana blockchain will have access to up to $1 million of capital from FTX Ventures, Balaji Srinivasan, and other operator angels in the Superteam network.
