Crypto investor Katie Haun made history after raising $1.5 billion for her new fund. She broke the record for the largest debut fund ever raised by a lone female founder.
Former investment banker Mary Meeker held the prior record, who raised $1.3 billion.
“It feels, honestly, like a lot of pressure. But I think that motivates everyone on the team,” Haun told CNBC. “Web3 is the new era of the internet, and it deserves a new era of investors.”
Web3, or Web 3.0, is the latest internet technology that brings artificial intelligence into the blockchain. Examples of this include NFTs and decentralized finance applications, but all in all, the space is new and experimental.
Haun Ventures will invest in start-up equity and the tokens issued by the start-ups. “That’s something I’ve learned through being involved in deploying three other crypto funds: there’s still a ton of potential in crypto and Web3 equity business models, but also token business models,” she said. “I don’t think that you can really be a crypto investor without holding tokens.”
The fund will distribute $500 million for early-stage companies and protocols and $1 billion to advance later-stage projects.
Haun Ventures is run by a team of nine people, including Chris Lehane, a former Clinton administration official, Tomicah Tillemann, a former staffer for President Joe Biden, and Rachael Horwitz, who was the leader of communications at Twitter, Google, Facebook, and Coinbase.
