Tribe Capital Has $16M First Close for $50M Crypto Fund

The fund will focus on seed-stage projects that can make it easier for developers to build in the space, said managing partner Boris Revsin.

Tribe Capital, a venture capital firm with $1.6 billion in assets under management, has closed the first round of a new crypto-related  fund with $16.3 million raised towards the $50 million target, Tribe Capital managing partner Boris Revsin exclusively told Unchained Crypto.

The fund will back seed-stage projects. The next close for the fund is expected to be announced in the coming months.

According to a filing on Wednesday with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commision on Wednesday, the Tribe Digital Future Fund I, L.P. has raised $16,261,446 from 18 investors since the fund opened for investments on April 4. Revsin said that the soft target for the fund is $50 million, while the hard cap is $100 million.

The existence of the fund was first reported earlier this year with a $100 million fundraise target.

With the fund, Tribe Capital wants to lead seed-stage investments into what Revsin calls “the largest surface area in crypto,” which includes “settlement layers, scaling layers, development tools and middleware.”

“What we’re trying to do is invest in things that make it easier for developers in the ecosystem to build less expensively,” said Revsin. “The goal being to allow developers globally to build crypto products, both consumer products and other products, without needing to raise a lot of venture capital.”

The fund has already backed two projects, but the details have yet to be announced, said Revsin, who co-founded venture firm Republic Capital, joined Tribe in July 2022 to oversee the equity and crypto funds and the crypto incubation program for the earliest stage projects.

Founded in 2018 by Arjun Sethi, Jonathan Hsu and Ted Maidenberg, Tribe Capital has a quantitative approach to evaluating startups using a proprietary data framework. Tribe previously raised $75 million for a crypto fund in Oct. 2021, and its portfolio companies include crypto exchanges Kraken and Bitfinex.