Binance has raised up to $500 million in an effort to bolster its investments in Web3 startups.
According to an article by CNBC, this initiative will become the formal announcement of the company’s venture capital fund via Binance Labs in partnership with DST Global and Breyer Capital.
The $500 million fund is specifically allocated to Web3 startups and is intended to capitalize on the current bear market as a means to search for unicorn hopefuls.
Ken Li, Binance Labs Executive Director of Investments and M&A, stressed that there is very little change in early-stage private markets, although the number of startups achieving the unicorn status – that is, those with a $1 billion valuation – is “slowing down a bit.” Li added:
We are looking for projects with the potential to drive the growth of the Web3 ecosystem.
Binance estimates that there are around 300,000 to 500,000 active Web3 developers today. These are scattered throughout various crypto sub-sectors, including infrastructure, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), to name a few.
Announcing our fourth crypto fund, totaling $4.5B, to invest in promising web3 startups at every stage. This brings our total crypto/web3 funds raised to over $7.6B.
General Partner @cdixon shares more on https://t.co/xIezLlyDiC. https://t.co/Xc696Fu8UT
— a16z (@a16z) May 25, 2022
In other news, Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) raised a staggering $4.5 billion crypto fund. Like Binance’s initiative, this investment fund aims to support crypto and blockchain startups. Moreover, the amount raised this time is at least double the figure mentioned in the last investment effort of the company six months ago.