Share this article
Crypto Fund Variant Commits $450M to Backing Web3, DeFi Projects
A $150 million seed fund will focus on Web3 and a separate $300 million opportunities fund will double down on portfolio projects.
By Brandy Betz
Updated May 11, 2023, 5:42 p.m. Published Jul 28, 2022, 3:41 p.m.
Variant, a crypto investment firm founded by Andreessen Horowitz veterans, has raised $450 million for a new umbrella fund split across a $150 million seed purse for Web3 projects and a $300 million opportunities vehicle that will “double-down on projects with demonstrated traction in our portfolio," according to a website post published Thursday.
Variant has started the fund, its third, during a bear market that saw venture capital investments in crypto drop 26% year over year in the first half of 2022. Investments slumped to $9.3 billion from a record $12.5 billion in the year-earlier period, according to Crunchbase data.
STORY CONTINUES BELOW
Don't miss another story.Subscribe to the Crypto Daybook Americas Newsletter today. See all newsletters
Investment theses for Variant Fund III include financial empowerment through decentralized finance (DeFi), blockchain computing, Web3 consumer applications and new forms of decentralized ownership. The firm has doubled the size of its staff to 15 to support the new funds.
The firm has previously invested in privacy-focused smart contract platform Aztec Network, Ethereum-based DeFi protocol Euler Finance, Polygon and Uniswap, to name a few. Variant Fund III follows a $110 million second fund last October, itself coming about a year after the $22.5 million debut fund.
“Variant was designed for this moment in crypto. And we have stayed small for a reason: because it enables us to work intimately with our portfolio and guide founders through the most important questions they face early on in their journey," Variant partners Li Jin, Spencer Noon and Jesse Walden wrote in the post. "That work is as critical now as ever.”
Read more: VC Firms Variant Fund, Atelier Ventures Merge to Focus on the ‘Ownership Economy’
More For You
What to know:
- As of October 2025, GoPlus has generated $4.7M in total revenue across its product lines. The GoPlus App is the primary revenue driver, contributing $2.5M (approx. 53%), followed by the SafeToken Protocol at $1.7M.
- GoPlus Intelligence's Token Security API averaged 717 million monthly calls year-to-date in 2025 , with a peak of nearly 1 billion calls in February 2025. Total blockchain-level requests, including transaction simulations, averaged an additional 350 million per month.
- Since its January 2025 launch , the $GPS token has registered over $5B in total spot volume and $10B in derivatives volume in 2025. Monthly spot volume peaked in March 2025 at over $1.1B , while derivatives volume peaked the same month at over $4B.
More For You
Pye Finance Raises $5M Seed Round Led by Variant and Coinbase Ventures
The platform aims to make locked Solana staking positions tradable via an onchain marketplace.
What to know:
- Pye Finance raised a $5 million seed round led by Variant and Coinbase Ventures, with participation from Solana Labs, Nascent and Gemini.
- The startup is building an onchain marketplace on Solana for time-locked staking positions that can be traded.
- Pye says the product targets Solana’s large pool of staked SOL, worth roughly $75 billion, and aims to give validators and stakers more flexibility over terms and reward flows.
Top Stories
