Today we are happy to announce Castle Island Ventures III, a $250 million venture fund. The new fund will support our mission to partner with visionary entrepreneurs building transformative companies powered by public blockchains. We are excited to expand our roster of limited partners who believe in this mission. This LP group includes representation from endowment, foundation, asset management, insurance, family office and fund of fund groups.
We believe that public blockchains represent a paradigm shift in the way we interact with money, financial services, and the internet itself. This new fund gives us the ability to support three big themes that continue to excite us:
- Monetary Networks: We are in the early days of a monetary transition towards a rules-based monetary order. This transition is happening across both non-sovereign monetary networks like Bitcoin and Ethereum and is also in evident in the rapid rise of stablecoins, which give regular savers worldwide a free choice of currency — in many cases for the first time. The addressable market for these new monetary networks is enormous and is matched only by the scale of the entrepreneurial ambition working on the associated companies and projects.
- Financial Services: We envision a financial system that is more programmable and transparent, less politicized, exclusionary, and intermediated. Such products and services are no longer academic in nature — they are in production and changing institutional and consumer behavior and market structure. The inability and unwillingness of legacy financial services firms to evolve in the face of this transition will be viewed in a similar fashion to the disruption that took place in the newspaper industry as the web became pervasive.
- Internet Architecture: In parallel to the monetary and financial transformation that is underway, ‘web3’ and new internet architectures propose digital property rights and enable new protocols and businesses that seek to disrupt and disempower online data and tech monopolies. The pendulum is swinging back towards giving individuals rights, ownership, and freedom online. Composable and decentralized internet topologies will prove commercially superior to highly centralized models and they will enable new business models to emerge. These systems are in the process of restoring the internet to the distributed ambitions of its early creators and we are excited to continue backing entrepreneurs that are building them.
We are also thrilled to announce that Ria Bhutoria has been promoted to a General Partner, joining Nic, Matt and Sean Judge as GPs. We will be growing our team significantly over the next year, so stay tuned for more on that front.
If you are an entrepreneur that is building towards this future, we would love to speak with you. Please email us at info@castleisland.vc