Paradigm, the venture firm behind some of crypto's most consequential early bets, closed its fourth fund at $1.2 billion — and the mandate now stretches well beyond blockchain.
The firm was co-founded by Matt Huang, a former Sequoia Capital partner, and Fred Ehrsam, the Coinbase co-founder. Together they've grown assets under management to roughly $12 billion. Earlier funds were purely crypto-focused. The fourth is different: it officially targets crypto, AI, robotics, and frontier technologies. Early investments include Zipline, the autonomous drone delivery company valued at $7.6 billion, space-defense startup True Anomaly, and Nous Research, an independent AI lab.
The rationale is straightforward. AI absorbed roughly 70% of all venture capital in Q2 2026, while Bitcoin declined about 30% over the same period. A crypto-only mandate starts to look narrow when the most ambitious founders are building at the intersection of blockchains and machine learning — not squarely inside either one alone.
Paradigm isn't making this move alone. Framework Ventures raised $400 million last month with a similarly broad mandate. Haun Ventures closed a $1 billion fund in May that included AI investments for the first time. The top names in crypto VC are becoming technology investors who happen to know digital assets well.
The firm's existing crypto holdings remain intact — Hyperliquid, Kalshi, and Tempo, the stablecoin blockchain co-founded with Stripe, all sit inside the new vehicle. What was once a quiet repositioning has become an explicit declaration: the wall between crypto VC and tech VC is coming down.
