Electric Capital's New $110M VC Fund Is 90% Institutions

Crypto venture capital firm Electric Capital has closed its second fund at $110 million. Of the money raised, 90% of it is institutional capital.

“The early-adopter, forward-thinking investors are now significantly off zero and now everyone is looking at those guys and saying, ‘Oh, maybe we should be off zero as well,’” Electric Capital co-founder Avichal Garg told CoinDesk in an interview.

The new fund includes multiple undisclosed university endowments, Garg said, a potential bellwether for traditional investors becoming more crypto-comfortable.

Electric’s new fund will invest in startup equity, crypto tokens or a hybrid of the two. Checks will be in the $1 million to $10 million range and focus on seed and Series A rounds. The firm’s first round raised $35 million, said Garg and fellow co-founder Curtis Spencer.

Initial investments from the new fund include DerivaDEX on the equity side; token investments in base layers Celo and NEAR; and liquid holdings of bitcoin (BTC), ether (ETH) and maker (MKR).

The second fund will continue Electric’s three-pronged focus on Layer 1 protocols, decentralized finance (DeFi) and crypto-enabled businesses.

Read more: This a16z Alum Is Launching a VC Fund Focused on Platforms You Can ‘Own’

The Silicon Valley-based Garg and Spencer began angel investing in crypto startups in 2016 after taking an early interest in bitcoin mining in 2011. After VCs began reaching out during the last bull run, the two decided to make it official, founding Electric in early 2018.

Current investments include Anchorage, Bison Trails, Bitwise, Coda, Elrond, Mobilecoin and others.

As for what drove institutional interest this time around, Garg said macroeconomic conditions played a major role.

“The thing that really tipped it was all the money printing that happened in March,” he said.

The Financial Times reported in April that VC giant Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) was targeting $450 million for its second crypto fund.