San Francisco-based investment fund Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) recently led a $40 million investment into Golden, a decentralized knowledge company that complies with and streamlines open source data and allows community access.
This is the venture capital firm’s first foray into the space after focusing on centralized and decentralized finance companies. Other investors participating in the funding round are – Protocol Labs, OpenSea Ventures (the venture fund of the NFT marketplace), Harpoon Ventures, Vela Partners, and founders of Solana, Twitch, Dropbox, and Postmates, among others.
Golden protocol’s testnet saw participation from over 35,000 users. Golden’s goal is to create a database for the discovery and verification of knowledge in an open source and transparent web3 manner.
a16z at the forefront of investing in the crypto space
The VC fund, founded by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, has already raised over $7 billion across four funds to invest in crypto and blockchain-focused companies. The $40 million investment is part of this fund.
a16z has been plowing investments into the crypto space since the onset of the bear market. Arianna Simpson, a general partner at a16z, said the firm wants to take advantage of this market to focus on long-term projects. Simpson said, “Bear markets are often when the best opportunities come about, when people are actually able to focus on building technology rather than getting distracted by short-term price activity.”
Several top companies in the crypto industry such as OpenSea, Yuga Labs, Solana, Avalanche, and Dapper Labs are funded by a16z.
Despite the downturn in the market, VC investments into crypto companies have held up according to audit giant KPMG. In the first half of 2022, VCs invested over $14 billion in crypto companies across 725 deals. This is nearly neck-and-neck with crypto investments made in the first half of 2021. However, the auditing firm expects the VC funds flow to cool off in the second half of 2022 given the lackluster crypto prices.
