Brussels-based Tioga Capital has announced the final close of its inaugural fund at $70 million, a figure up $53 million since the firms’ first close, announced almost a year ago to date. Tioga is targeting promising blockchain-technology-focused European startups, primarily in the infrastructure and open finance sectors (for now), and wants in on seed and Series A deals with an average ticket size of €1.5 million.
Tioga’s investment strategy is fairly simple: it believes in the potential of blockchain-focused startups, and is angling to be one of the major backers in the European sector. However, that’s not to see that Tioga is alone in this goal as Kraken Ventures, Fabric Ventures, BlueYard, Maven 11, Greenfield One, and Semantic are all traveling in the same pack.
What’s important about Tioga’s $70 million AUM (and Kraken’s equally impressive $65 million, announced today as well) is that the VC firm has attracted the support of a number of well-known Belgian family offices (e.g. Van Hool and Vlerick), tech entrepreneurs such as Jurgen Ingels, SRIW, a sovereign wealth fund that manages about $4 billion worth of assets, and as part of the final close, welcomed a commitment from the KU Leuven endowment, one of the largest of its kind in continental Europe.
Tioga Capital’s Nicolas Priem notes that the proof is in the pudding; with multiple sovereign wealth funds, family offices, and endowments now wanting in on the game, these traditionally conservative investors have been convinced by the potential in the blockchain-based-technologies sector and are providing the fuel for the fire that’s destined to set the next version of “the web” as we know it, ablaze.
“What makes Web3 so special is that this permissionless nature makes it highly interoperable and hence attractive for other developers to build on top of each other’s protocols,” added Tiogo Capital’s Michiel Lescrauwaet. “This is in stark contrast to Web2 big tech companies where most of the APIs and data sources are not available to outsiders. While this seems like a trivial difference at first glance, the impact of the increased innovation is not to be underestimated, as all of a sudden a thousand flowers can blossom.”
Over the course of the past year, Tioga Capital has made 10 investments, including bitcoin self-custody platform Casa, NFT infrastructure startup Venly, privacy protocols infrastructure developer Nym, DeFi lending protocol JellyFi, NFT platform Exclusible, and crypto tax specialist Blockpit.
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