Lightspeed Faction raises $285M crypto fund despite broader VC decline

Lightspeed Faction has raised $285 million in capital for investment in early-stage crypto projects, the Menlo Park-based fund announced Thursday. 

Faction has already inked twenty deals, most of which are yet to be made public, but around 80% of the $285 million remains uncommitted, the fund’s co-founder told Blockworks. 

Lightspeed Faction is a blockchain-focused joint venture with Lightspeed Venture Partners that first came to light in mid-2022. This is the firm’s first venture fund.

Faction co-founder Samuel Harrison said the fund is interested in projects at the infrastructure and protocol level, mentioning wallets and brokerages, developer tooling platforms, and remittance services as a few examples. 

“The TL;DR is we’ve been really focused on the plumbing,” Banafsheh Fathieh, Faction’s other co-founder, said. 

The fund closed in July 2023, Fathieh said. 

Faction’s announcement comes as VC sentiment towards crypto seems dour — the sum of crypto venture capital has declined in five of the six quarters since the first of 2022. 

“There’s a lot of narrative around capital having dried up…we remain very firmly committed to crypto. We’re not a fund that’s investing in frontier tech or something. We are investing specifically [in] all things blockchain related, and we’re not going to deviate from that,” Fathieh said.

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