DePIN

28 VCs and 100 funds investing in DePIN

VCs investing in DePIN

Lukas Kristen

General Partner

Plutos Capital

Check: $250K–$500K stated first-check range in a current @FryCookVC public post, with 'no matter how early' guidance. Plutos describes investing from pre-seed through Series A across equity and token rounds. Confirm currency, ownership, reserves and whether the range applies to the Genesis Fund before relying on it.

Lukas backs deeply technical founders building sovereign, privacy-enabling infrastructure across blockchain, AI and dual-use systems. His central claim is that institutions need the openness, neutral settlement and composability of public chains but cannot expose salaries, counterparties, cash flow, supply chains or trading strategies. Private permissioned chains repeatedly lose network effects and create costly governance silos; the investable bridge is privacy technology—zero-knowledge proofs, encrypted transactions and mempools, confidential compute, TEEs and secure hardware—that preserves public-chain interoperability while protecting sensitive data. He extends that secure-compute thesis across software and hardware, terrestrial and orbital systems.

Pre-seedSeedSeries A

Guy Wuollet

General Partner

93%

a16z crypto

Check: No personal check-size range is published. Public seed, Series A, and later financing amounts are company-level transaction sizes and are not a defensible proxy for Guy's individual range or allocation authority.

Guy invests across the crypto stack with a technical focus on infrastructure, DeFi, and decentralized physical infrastructure. He looks for blockchains to coordinate markets that centralized intermediaries serve poorly—compute, energy, telecom, transportation, credit, and global finance—and for open protocols whose incentives unlock latent capacity, lower coordination costs, and compound through interoperability and composability.

SeedSeries AEarly Stage

Kyle Samani

Co-Founder & Managing Partner

90%

Multicoin Capital

Thesis-driven investing. Crypto as coordination layer for the internet. Fat protocol thesis. Early Solana bull. DePIN evangelist.

SeedSeries AToken

Beryl Li

Director / Investment Committee

89%

YGG Ventures

Check: No portfolio-company check range was disclosed. The announced 2023 YGG Ventures Fund I targeted $75M and a $500K minimum LP commitment, but the latter is an LP subscription minimum—not a startup check size—and current fund deployment status is not publicly confirmed.

Beryl's investment role was framed around early-stage token and equity investments in Web3 game studios and the infrastructure needed for the sector to grow. Her broader operating thesis begins with community distribution and digital ownership: games must be genuinely fun, use blockchain behind the scenes, enable players in emerging markets to learn and earn, and build sustainable economics rather than treating token rewards as the product.

Pre-seedSeedEarly Stage

Stanko Nedic

Partner

88%

V3V Ventures

Check: No Stanko-specific check range is public. A current third-party V3V profile reports a firm-level typical range of $100K–$1M at pre-seed/seed, while public round databases describe the larger rounds V3V joins rather than its own checks. Treat $100K–$1M as directional and confirm instrument, allocation and follow-on capacity directly.

Stanko invests in early-stage software, digital infrastructure and emerging technology, with a strong Web3 focus and an engineer's bias toward difficult, foundational systems. His current public filter is a move away from narratives toward measurable fundamentals: real products, revenue, product traction, user retention and sustainable business models. Within crypto he highlights infrastructure, stablecoin and payment rails, institutional adoption, DeFi, cross-chain systems and the decentralized-AI stack across compute, storage, data, models and applications. V3V pairs capital with architecture, GTM, distribution and follow-on fundraising support.

Pre-seedSeedSelective later follow-on

Raye Hadi

Research Associate, Digital Assets

88%

ARK Invest

Check: Not applicable as a personal founder check. Raye is a digital-assets research associate supporting ARK's managed investment strategies; the cited sources do not establish personal venture check-writing authority or a standard startup ticket.

Raye analyzes how cryptoassets can disrupt legacy financial systems, with particular depth in stablecoin architecture and DeFi application economics. He evaluates networks and tokens through reserves, legal claims, peg resilience, governance, accessibility, incentives and value capture, while tracking the shift of economic activity from base layers toward applications such as exchanges, lending, cards, prediction markets and tokenized assets.

Liquid CryptoassetsPublic MarketsThematic Research

Matt Manley

Senior Finance Associate

88%

CoinFund

Check: Not applicable to Matt's finance-operations role. He has no published personal investment authority or check size. Founder materials should be sent to CoinFund's projects address, while finance, administration or investor requests should follow the relevant official channel.

Matt's operating lens joins audit discipline with crypto-native middle-office experience: substantiate data completeness and accuracy, turn raw records into understandable reporting, automate repeatable controls and support institutional activity across custody, staking, DeFi, OTC settlement and other digital-asset products. His personal writing connects decentralization to freedom, privacy, open access and community while arguing that today's industry needs cooperation and bipartisan support rather than exclusion of government. This is an operational worldview, not a personal investment mandate.

Fund finance operationsMiddle-office reportingProcess automation

Lukas Etter

Co-CIO & General Partner

88%

CV VC

Check: CV VC's published early-stage program invests up to $500,000 in qualifying pre-seed and seed companies with an MVP and initial traction. This is a firm program limit, not Lukas's personal allocation range; other vehicles and follow-ons may differ.

Lukas backs early frontier-technology companies building a decentralized and tokenized economy, with a current emphasis on traditional businesses moving onto blockchain rails and the convergence of blockchain with AI. He favors working products with measurable utility, economic or social impact, and operationally credible paths from early traction to institutional or global adoption.

Pre-SeedSeedAccelerator

Mike Zajko

Co-Founder & General Partner

88%

Lattice Fund

Check: $250K–$1M from pre-seed through Series A, per Lattice's current official approach page. The firm says it invests globally, makes fast independent decisions and seeks non-consensus companies at their earliest stages.

Mike backs infrastructure, networks and applications that make money, markets and scarce resources more open. He originated Lattice's 2022 Token-Incentivized Physical Infrastructure Networks thesis and has since applied it to distributed energy, bandwidth, mobility and data. His broader lens favors open-source coordination, useful demand and real economic flows over closed networks or reflexive token speculation.

Pre-SeedSeedSeries A

Mason Nystrom

Partner

88%

Pantera Capital

Check: No person-specific check size is publicly disclosed. Pantera's published venture approach typically invests from Seed through Series B and aims to lead or co-lead; founders should confirm fit rather than infer a check from third-party databases.

Mason is an application-layer investor looking for products that use crypto coordination and ownership to change how large groups of people interact. His work emphasizes stablecoins as global payment infrastructure, peer-to-peer market structures, programmable internet-native capital formation and blockchain becoming invisible infrastructure inside useful consumer and real-world applications.

SeedSeries ASeries B

Yerui Zhang

Investment Director

86%

HashKey Capital

Check: No verified personal check-size range is published. HashKey Capital operates multiple venture, liquid, and multi-strategy vehicles; fund size and disclosed portfolio rounds should not be converted into Yerui's individual authority.

Yerui is a HashKey investment director with documented fund-committee responsibility and a contributor to the firm's technical sector research. The research evaluates infrastructure and applications across ZK, MEV, intents, account abstraction, data availability, Bitcoin, AI x crypto, DePIN, staking, and related Web3 layers. The consistent lens is whether technical design improves transaction flow, verifiability, capital efficiency, decentralization, and real demand.

SeedSeries AEarly Stage

Brian Breslow

Investor

86%

No Limit Holdings

Check: No Brian-specific or official current check range is public. NLH Fund II is positioned to lead early-stage native-crypto investments, and the firm's disclosed portfolio spans pre-seed, seed, strategic and Series A rounds. Round totals are not personal check sizes; founders should ask Brian or the firm about current sizing and instrument.

Brian invests in early-stage blockchain infrastructure and crypto-native businesses where a protocol or token can coordinate a real resource, market or financial rail. His recent work looks beyond defensive crypto narratives toward useful infrastructure: quantum-compute orchestration, verifiable markets for scarce compute, stablecoin wrappers that bring differentiated private-credit yield onchain, decentralized ownership for an AI-heavy economy and businesses whose utility can survive the collapse of undifferentiated L1 monetary premium.

Pre-seedSeedSeries A

Jin Ming Neo

Sr. Investment Research Associate

86%

HashKey Capital

Check: No reliable personal check range or individual signing authority is public. Jin Ming Neo is a research associate, so founders should treat HashKey Capital's fund strategy—not a directory estimate—as the relevant context and confirm stage, allocation, lead role, ownership, token/equity structure, and decision process with the investment team.

Jin Ming Neo contributes to broad, research-led sector evaluation across Web3. HashKey's coauthored 1H 2024 analysis favors teams with defined technical advantages, credible go-to-market, or proven execution; AI and DePIN infrastructure with real demand; sustainable Bitcoin utility; institution-grade trading, staking, lending, stablecoin, and derivatives infrastructure; and products that solve ecosystem maturity, adoption, liquidity, or user-experience constraints.

SeedSeries AEarly Stage

Mateusz Rzeszowski

Co-founder

85%

Zee Prime Capital

Zee Prime Capital is a remote-first crypto fund investing in infrastructure and DeFi. Known for deep technical analysis and early Solana ecosystem conviction.

SeedSeries A

Tim Khoury

Deal Partner

84%

Lightspeed Faction

Check: Faction does not publish a standard check range or Tim's personal authority. The official mandate is Seed and Series A, across equity and tokens; public financing sizes are not Faction check sizes.

Tim is a crypto-native early-stage investor with an explicit interest at the intersection of crypto and AI. His WeatherXM work shows a demand-first DePIN lens: token incentives can coordinate distributed supply, but a network is only durable when there is an external customer for the data or service produced. That fits Faction's broader mandate to back useful blockchain systems across the stack rather than speculation for its own sake.

SeedSeries AEarly Stage

Evan Feng

Partner

84%

CoinFund

Check: Personal check size is not publicly disclosed. CoinFund invests from pre-seed through Series A and in liquid digital assets across multiple strategies.

Evan applies fundamental-investing discipline to both venture and liquid crypto: identify the metrics that genuinely drive an asset, forecast them, define thesis-invalidation points in advance, and pressure-test assumptions through an authentic external network. He looks beyond equity-style valuation heuristics to community, network effects, token demand, distribution, and the new product surface enabled by open onchain economies.

Pre-SeedSeedSeries A

Tushar Jain

Managing Partner

83%

Multicoin Capital

Open finance and tokenization. Strong views on stablecoins, DePIN, and crypto in emerging markets.

SeedSeries AToken

Anies Khan

Associate

80%

Greenfield Capital

Check: No Anies-specific check size is public. Greenfield has led or co-led seed rounds in companies covered by his publications, but announced round size is not the firm's check and cannot establish his personal allocation. Founders should confirm current vehicle, stage, ownership and reserves directly.

Anies looks for crypto infrastructure that coordinates real economic activity: public blockchains modernizing capital markets, privacy-preserving compliance for institutional DeFi, security systems that respond to onchain threats, purpose-built networks for machines and stablecoin settlement that improves fragmented internet infrastructure. The recurring standard is that crypto must solve coordination, access, security or capital formation better than a conventional database or payment rail.

Pre-seedSeedSeries A

Bobby Beniers

Principal

80%

CoinFund

Check: No personal or standard check range is publicly disclosed. CoinFund's portfolio identifies Bobby as a deal lead/sponsor alongside David Pakman on Monkey Tilt's 2025 Series B, but that transaction does not establish a reusable individual ticket or sole authority.

Bobby invests where programmable incentives and permissionless coordination can form new information, financial, infrastructure and machine-agent markets. His current scope joins early DeFi and DePIN experience with the agentic economy, and he emphasizes distribution and adoption as much as technical novelty. His token-design work suggests attention to whether incentives create durable participation rather than transient activity.

Pre-SeedSeedSeries A

Sam Hallene

Investment Partner

79%

CMT Digital

Check: $100K-$5M; public directory sweet spot approximately $1.5M

Hallene takes a generalist, early-stage approach within blockchain, spanning DeFi, stablecoins and payments, DePIN, sector-specific chains, and core infrastructure. Public interviews emphasize portfolio construction, long-term founder relationships, and the conviction that more global financial activity will move onto blockchain rails.

SeedSeries A

Herbie Fu

Partner

77%

Hack VC

Check: No personal check range is publicly disclosed. Hack VC says it partners at the earliest stages across crypto, AI and frontier technology, and the firm led GAIB's seed round; neither the round nor third-party ticket estimates establish Herbie's standard or unilateral check authority.

Herbie invests at the intersection of crypto, AI and productive infrastructure. His GAIB thesis treats compute as a scarce commodity that can become an investable, yield-producing on-chain asset, financing cloud and data-center growth while opening participation in AI economics. His prior fund-building and advisory work across Asia supports a cross-border ecosystem lens as well as a founder/operator perspective.

Pre-SeedSeedEarliest Stage

Xiao Xiao

Partner

76%

HashKey Capital

Check: Firm-level public estimate: typically $1M-$5M, varying by stage and opportunity

Xiao looks for durable, real-use-case crypto products that can bring users from Web2 into Web3 and survive multiple market cycles. Public interviews show a broad mandate across DeFi, gaming, stablecoins, and AI, with especially strong interest in DePIN and real-world-asset tokenization, as well as Ethereum and Layer 2 ecosystems.

Pre-SeedSeedSeries A