Castle Island Ventures Confirms $250M Fund Targeting Web3 Startups

Venture capital firm Castle Island Ventures has announced a $250 million raise for its latest crypto fund focused on startups building out monetary networks, internet infrastructure and financial services.

Blockworks previously reported on the imminent launch of the fund, dubbed Castle Island Ventures III.

According to a company blog post on Wednesday, Castle Island Ventures said it believed the industry was in its “early days” of a monetary transition toward a rules-based monetary order and was seeking to capitalize on the movement.

“The new fund will support our mission to partner with visionary entrepreneurs building transformative companies powered by public blockchains,” company partner Matt Walsh said in the post.

Castle Island’s portfolio includes a number of well-known crypto startups and ventures, including BlockFi, Bitwise, CoinMetrics, Mash, MoonPay and River Financial.

Walsh further said his company intended to invest in firms it believed could affect change in the financial services sector whilst leveraging Web3 protocols to shake up legacy financial services firms and their inability to evolve.

“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,” Walsh said.

The Boston-based company also announced Ria Bhutoria — formerly director of research at Fidelity — as general partner, joining the likes of Nic Carter, Walsh and Sean Judge.

Its latest raise follows its previous $50 million fund last year, focused exclusively on public blockchains. The company’s first fund debuted back in 2018 and was valued at $30 million.

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