MetaWeb Ventures, a global venture capital firm focused on pre-seed and seed investments in crypto start-ups, announced the launch of its first fund (“Fund I” or “the Fund”), with total capital commitments of $30 million USD. LPs in the Fund include NEAR Foundation, Sequoia China, Dragonfly Capital, GSR Markets, Octopus Network, SevenX, Mentha Partners, as well as notable entrepreneurs such as NEAR’s co-founder Illia Polosukhin, Matrix China’s co-founder Bo Shao, Alchemy Pay’s founder Shawn Shi, Dodo’s co-founder Mark Wang, and more.

MetaWeb is focused on supporting developers and researchers building the future of Web3. The Fund has been operating in stealth mode over the past few months and has already invested in 33 start-ups. Most notably, MetaWeb invested in Orderly, Niche, CornerstoneDAO, Sender Wallet, Kino, and Play3.

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MetaWeb is led by crypto veterans Amos Zhang and Dani Osorio. Amos is a serial entrepreneur who has run start-ups in blockchain and SaaS with multiple successful exits. Before joining MetaWeb, Amos ran Global Marketing and was the GM for Asia at NEAR Protocol. Dani has spent over 15 years at high growth start-ups; before joining MetaWeb she co-founded an NFT Infrastructure start-up, led Developer Ecosystem at NEAR Protocol, and was a Director at Infura/Consensys. She volunteers as Head of Content at crypto festival EthDenver, as well as sits on the boards of SporkDAO and the CypherPunk Guild.

MetaWeb aims to create outsized returns by investing in highly innovative projects and builders who can unlock the mainstream adoption of blockchain for billions of users.

“We founded MetaWeb to back the future Web3 leaders who will disrupt the world through blockchain. As former entrepreneurs, we will work side by side with the founders throughout their journey,” said Amos Zhang, Managing Partner at MetaWeb Ventures.

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The entire MetaWeb team is deeply embedded into the blockchain developer ecosystem and is able to support founders in the earliest stages. The Fund will primarily invest in the decentralized social media, DeFi, gaming, infrastructure, and DAO verticals. A Second Fund (“Fund II”) will follow in 2023.

“At the core, MetaWeb is unique in that we’re all builders who also invest– we have direct access to early projects as we can provide a very special kind of support to our founders,” said Dani Osorio, Partner at MetaWeb Ventures.

With deep domain expertise in both blockchain technology and NEAR Protocol, MetaWeb was created as NEAR’s first ecosystem fund. That vision was aligned with that of a multi-chain future, so MetaWeb began investing in the best platforms and applications across additional protocols including Ethereum, Aurora, Cosmos, and more.