Tykhe Block Ventures Has First Close of $30 Million Blockchain Growth Fund

Tykhe Block Ventures, a US-based venture capital firm, has announced the first close of its Blockchain Growth Fund. The first closing was led by a number of UHNWIs and family offices operating in Southeast Asia and the Middle East. The firm has also committed that approximately $10 million of the fund will be allocated to invest in blockchain and Web3 startups in the Middle East region. Tykhe is also setting up its Dubai office and aims to launch $100 million later this year.

Tykhe Block Ventures was started in 2021 by Prashant Malik, one of the leading investors in SEA (an early investor in several unicorns such as Urbanclap, Shadowfax, OfBusiness and Coinswitch) and recognized as the creator of Apache Cassandra – the distributed database used by the majority of technology companies globally. Prashant built Cassandra when he joined Facebook as one of the earliest employees – which was later open sourced as Apache Cassandra.

“My passion for the blockchain space started in 2016, when it drew many parallels from Cassandra, which is a peer-to-peer masterless database that runs on a voting mechanism similar to blockchain. In 2021, together with my partners, we launched a pilot blockchain fund that did significantly well. It gave us the confidence to launch $30 Mn Blockchain Growth Fund. Despite the softness of the market, we have seen a lot of interest from investors who believe that blockchain is going to be the next big story in the technology space, like how social media was when I started building Facebook.”

said Prashant.

As sponsors, Prashant and other investment partners have committed $5 million to the fund. The fund managers collect a combined 30+ years of the core blockchain investment experience where they have invested in more than 80+ companies.

“Star teams building in the blockchain space are reaching out to us to access not only venture capital but also relationship capital. Given my experience building Cassandra, I am able to guide them in setting a scalable and secure architecture for DLT (distributed ledger technology).”

quoted Prashant.

Some of the recent investments made as part of Blockchain Growth Fund consists of Trust Machines, Fan Tiger, DWallet Labs (Odsy Network), NFTPerp, Convrse.

The Blockchain space has recently been devastated by the implosions of companies such as Celsius, FTX and generally a deep correction in cryptocurrency prices. However, Tykhe sees this development as a necessary and healthy correction. “All the players that went down were centralized entities and have no connection to the ethos of blockchain technology – which stands for decentralization. Thanks to our thesis of investing in pure decentralized networks, our portfolio companies have done reasonably well, despite the global downturn. Indeed “We are probably one of the few funds in our space that has achieved high double-digit returns in the last year — when everyone else has seen a deep correction,” said Ganesh, who leads the investment team.

The global Web3 market size reached $3.2 billion in 2021 and is expected to register a CAGR of 43.7% to reach $81.5 billion in 2030, according to Emergen Research published in June 2022. The Middle East, and specifically Dubai, is home to a number of blockchain and cryptocurrency startups and exchanges, making it a natural hub for the industry.