What is EMURGO Ventures?
EMURGO Ventures is an investment arm of EMURGO, a founding entity of the Cardano blockchain, and invests in a variety of startups and middleware solutions companies based in North/South America and Europe, to drive Cardano’s Web3 ecosystem development.
Launched as part of EMURGO’s initial $100 million Cardano ecosystem investment vehicle in 2021, EMURGO Ventures added new senior management, outlined its investment strategy, presented to the Cardano community at Consensus, and made several investments in 2022.
In this yearly recap, we will go over EMURGO Ventures’ activities from 2022.
Presenting a clear investment strategy
Led by EMURGO Ventures Managing Partner Takashi Hayashida and Venture Partner Kaimin Hu, the investment team at EMURGO Ventures has experience in both traditional finance and the growing blockchain space.
Earlier this year, EMURGO Ventures outlined a clear and broad investment strategy to invest in tech and blockchain startups building Web3 technologies with Cardano interoperability.
This strategy aims to drive Cardano’s Web3 adoption by investing in a variety of Cardano-native and non-Cardano Web3 technologies that can provide interoperable solutions and services to Cardano’s growing user base.
More specifically, EMURGO Ventures looks into investing in:
- On-chain data and asset aggregation platforms enabling deeper macro and micro insights
- ZK and Layer-2 solutions addressing blockchain scalability and interoperability
- Established high-caliber Web3 startups to bring proven, user-friendly features to Cardano.
- Established industries that display synergy with Cardano to accelerate the expansion of Cardano’s community and developer talent pool
EMURGO Ventures investments in Cardano’s Web3 ecosystem
Investing in the Cardano ecosystem was a big part of EMURGO Ventures’ investment strategy for 2022. Here are a few notable investments:
Wave Financial ADA Yield Fund
Along with Wave Financial and Input Output Global (IOG), EMURGO helped to launch the Wave ADA Yield Fund. The fund is designed to provide liquidity with millions in line to support new decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms launched in the Cardano ecosystem starting with an initial $100M.
Partisia Blockchain
The objective is for Cardano decentralized application (dApp) developers and its users to be able to leverage Partisia blockchain’s privacy-preserving zero-knowledge (ZK), multi-party computation (MPC) for Cardano dApps. Partisia’s development team will develop customized smart contracts for Cardano developers to utilize when applicable to their dApp’s use case, which will still use Cardano ADA or Cardano-based tokens.
AID:Tech
AID:Tech was the first company in the world to deliver international aid using blockchain in 2015. The investment in part supports AID:Tech to develop a Web3 “Volunteer-And-Earn” wallet and ecosystem utilizing blockchain-based decentralized identifiers (DIDs) & NFTs to create a digital identity solution for people to build an on-chain reputation, and ultimately empower volunteers at corporates, sports organizations, universities, NGOs, and charities to lead impactful initiatives with control over their own online identities.
DoraHacks
DoraHacks is a global leading Web3 hackathon organizer and the world’s most active multi-chain Web3 developer community with over 300,000 multi-chain developers and experts.
This investment helps to support EMURGO and DoraHacks to host global hackathons exclusively for Cardano’s ecosystem and identify co-investment opportunities into high-potential Web3 dApps displaying synergy with Cardano’s blockchain via DoraFactory, DoraHacks’ DAO-as-a-Service infrastructure which allows open-source projects to create decentralized autonomous organizations for their communities to govern and finance the projects.
BitMetis
BitMetis builds an Engage-to-Earn Game DID platform based on ZKP (Zero Knowledge Proof), ERC-4337 wallet, and AI technologies to provide efficient, secured, and interoperable credential solutions for game projects and players in the Web3 world.
Fourier Labs
Fourier is an EVM for Cardano. Fourier Protocol is a Haskell-programmed, high-performance, native EVM on Plutus of Cardano, the first industry solution to process account-based transactions on an Extended Unspent Transaction Output (eUTXO) ledger.
Humanode
The Humanode network is a protocol that can verify transactions running a public permissionless network based on collective human existence. It provides Sybil resistance and mitigates the problem of the disproportion of power in decentralized systems such as mining cartels or validator oligopolies.
SubQuery
SubQuery is an open-source blockchain data indexer for developers that provides fast, flexible, reliable, and decentralized APIs to power leading multi-chain apps. As an infrastructure builder, SubQuery can support the Cardano blockchain by providing APIs to various Cardano Web3 ecosystem projects including Cardano DeFi, Cardano NFTs, Cardano wallets, etc.
Interested in building on Cardano? Reach out to EMURGO Ventures
Startup projects, digital entrepreneurs, and companies interested in building or demonstrating synergy with the Cardano blockchain are encouraged to reach out to EMURGO Ventures for funding support, technical assistance, and other Cardano-related services.
Please contact EMURGO Ventures at ventures@dev.emurgo.io for more information.
About EMURGO
- Official Homepage: dev.emurgo.io
- Twitter (Global): @EMURGO_io
- YouTube: EMURGO channel
- Discord: EMURGO Community
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- LinkedIn: @EMURGO_io
