While a large number of cryptocurrency investors have scaled back the pace of their startup investments while waiting for the macro environment to become clearer, the fact is that there have never been more companies and more money committed to blockchain ventures.
Portal Ventures is the latest young company to announce its debut, telling the press that it has closed a $35 million fundraising round for its first fund for pre-seed investments in the cryptocurrency startup community. The fund is led by former Insight investor Evan Fisher, who said he hopes to find untapped value in the cryptocurrency space by focusing on infrastructure and enabling software needs in the space - the so-called "pick and shovel" segment of cryptocurrency startups.
The macro environment has driven down crypto token prices and compressed startup valuations across the board, which Fisher believes presents a lot of opportunities for small investors like himself, and his fund is fully committed to the Web3 market.
"The size of the opportunity is constant in a down cycle, but entry prices can change as a function of investor sentiment," Fisher wrote in Portal's second-quarter market reflection. We are likely to see private sector valuations continue to compress. For fundamental-driven investors, this can lead to exciting investment opportunities."
After Goldman, Fisher spent three years as a senior partner at Insight Partners. While at Insight, some of his investments include FTX, TaxBit, ZenGo, and Flutterwave. Individuals from Insight's management team make up the largest portion of the Fisher Fund, along with many of the biggest names in the cryptocurrency investing community.
Fisher told the outlet that he has spent much of the past year living in nomadic mode, rushing between cryptocurrency conferences and finding his way into the hacker house to find deals. Since January, Portal Ventures has closed eight deals, including bets on Web3 developer tools startup Polywrap and crypto gaming infrastructure startup Worlds.org.
Ori Shimony, another venture partner at Portal, comes from a background as a builder in the Web3 infrastructure space and runs a sizable group of cryptocurrency developers that assists the young company in fulfilling its promise to help young startups develop strategies and product roadmaps in addition to financial guidance.