Sandeep Nailwal, co-founder of Polygon, launched the venture fund Symbolic Capital worth $50 million, aimed at supporting Web3 startups in developing markets.
Nailwal’s project partner was Cere Network founder Kenzi Van. Their joint venture attracted funds into the fund from other venture investors, crypto exchanges, family offices and institutional investors, who declined to be named.
According to Nailwal, the structure intends to primarily back creators of dapps.
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— Symbolic Capital (@symbolicvc) August 25, 2022
Symbolic Capital has already invested in about 15 projects, including the Web3 gaming studio BlinkMoon, Planet Mojo metaverse built on Polygon and the esports platform Community Gaming.
Nailwal noted that the fund intends to allocate 80-90% of its capital to startups in developing countries. The investor is well acquainted with crypto projects in his native India, while his partner Kenzi Van is a specialist in the Web3 ecosystem in China and Southeast Asia. They believe this gives them broad visibility into leading developing markets.
One of the main motives for launching Symbolic, Nailwal said, was the opportunity to more formally support projects that are already in his orbit of influence. Since meeting at Binance Labs in 2019, the partners have jointly invested in more than 40 startups as business angels.
Nailwal said the fund would place particular emphasis on projects in the fantasy-sports space.
“In fantasy Web3 you can have NFTs that can be rented out when you’re not playing, and earn passive income. You can earn tokens on the platform and become part of this ecosystem at a very early stage,” he stressed.
According to the investor, such economic incentives are highly meaningful for users in developing countries. As examples he cited the popular M2E app Stepn-app and the P2E-game Axie Infinity (the founders of Symbolic invested as business angels in the studio behind the latter, Sky Mavis).
Regarding the evaluation of potential fund investments, Nailwal noted that the firm has built an internal data platform. The system will collect information on project activity on GitHub, interactions with Discord, token performance, employment trends and hiring. The company has also developed its own due diligence framework. due diligence.
In August, Polygon served as the anchor investor for a new $25 million fund from venture studio SuperLayer.
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