Venture capital firms are capitalizing on the current bullish market conditions. In March, Borderless Capital, a Web3-native investment company, acquired quantitative trading firm CFT Capital, expanding its portfolio to include artificial intelligence and quant proprietary trading products. The move aims to enhance capital deployment efficiency across Web3 verticals. Borderless Capital currently manages $600 million in assets and has invested early in companies like Algorand, Blockdaemon, and Securitize, which is now partnering with BlackRock in a tokenized digital fund. In addition to the acquisition, Borderless Capital plans to expand its presence in Latin America, with a focus on countries like Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Chile, and Mexico.
Looking ahead, Borderless Capital expects cross-chain standardization to be the next phase of evolution in the crypto space by 2024. The company believes that the emergence of new L1s, L2s, and even L3s will drive mainstream adoption of Web3. Borderless Capital’s co-founder, David Garcia, emphasized the importance of an aggregation layer that can interoperate across any chain.
Decentralized physical infrastructure (DePIN) is another key investment focus for Borderless Capital. The company sees DePIN as a new coordination and innovation paradigm that can revolutionize various industries, including communication, distributed computation, mapping, and transportation.
In other news, several startups have successfully raised capital in recent weeks. Morph, an Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) layer-2 platform, raised $20 million in angel and seed funding. The funds will be used for talent acquisition, developer incentives, and marketing. FLock.io, a London-based Web3 decentralized AI startup, secured a $6 million seed round for its Federated Learning-powered Training Platform. The company aims to decentralize AI agent training, fine-tuning, and inferencing while ensuring fair rewards for data contributors. Keyring Network, a platform leveraging zero-knowledge technology for digital asset compliance, raised $6 million in seed funding. Rails, a self-custodial perpetuals exchange, raised $6.2 million to develop its platform further. Finally, BOB (Build on Bitcoin), a hybrid layer-2 solution, raised $10 million to launch the first Bitcoin layer-2 with Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatibility. The funds will be used to onboard decentralized applications (DApps) on the Bitcoin network.
Tokenization platform RACE also disclosed a $5 million funding round to support its recently launched testnet. RACE aims to tokenize various assets, such as aircraft, real estate, private credits, art, jewelry, and gold, for accredited and institutional investors. The platform plans to establish Decentralized Investment Committees (DICs) composed of industry experts who will conduct due diligence on assets before tokenization.
Overall, the venture capital landscape in the crypto space remains active, with firms seizing opportunities to invest in innovative startups and technologies.