Arnault-Backed Tech Investment Firm Aglaé Ventures to Launch €100 million Web3 Fund

Aglaé Ventures has previously backed Web2 giants such as Airbnb, Netflix, Slack and Spotify.
Image source: Aglaé Ventures

Quick take:

  • Aglaé Ventures made its first foray into Web3 by co-leading a $30 million round for crypto-asset trading solution, Flowdesk.
  • The fund will target centralised and decentralised finance, Web3 infrastructure, blockchain scalability specialists and more.
  • The Arnault family has been making moves in the crypto and Web3 space this year.

Aglaé Ventures, the tech investment vehicle of Agache (formerly Groupe Arnault), is set to launch a dedicated  €100 million Web3 fund, according to sources of The Block.

Aglaé’s plan to launch a Web3 fund was confirmed by three people familiar with the matter. Two of those people said that the size of the fund will be between €100 million and €110 million.

The Paris-based venture firm has previously backed Web2 giants such as Airbnb, Netflix, Slack and Spotify. It made its first foray into Web3 by co-leading a $30 million round for crypto-asset trading solution Flowdesk. However, the investment did not come from the crypto fund, which has yet to make an investment public.

This new Web3 fund follows the appointments of former CoinFund head of portfolio growth Vanessa Grellet and former Aave COO Jordan Lazaro Gustave to lead Aglaé’s crypto investment.

According to Blockworks, Gustave and Grellet will target investments in decentralised and centralised finance, Web3 infrastructure, layer-1 and layer-2 scalability, and the creator economy.

“It’s been a very successful VC in Web2, but they were seeing a lot of things coming in Web3 and wanted to hire someone who is a specialist to manage that portion of their investments,” Grellet told Blockworks following her appointment in May.

Agache is the controlling shareholder of luxury goods giant LVMH, owned by Bernard Arnault. In February, the LVMH CEO expressed his scepticism about jumping into Web3, saying: “At this stage, we are very much in the real world, selling real products. We are not interested in selling virtual sneakers for 10 euros. We’re not into that.” However, he did also say that the company would look into the applications of NFTs and the metaverse.

Despite that, the scions of LVMH have been making moves in the crypto and Web3 space this year. Alexandre Arnault, Tiffany & Co.’s EVP of product and communications joined the CryptoPunks community in February. Alexandre Arnault also recently spearheaded the NFTiff project, which turns CryptoPunks into custom pendants.

Tiffany & Co. marked its entry into the Web3 space with the acquisition of “Okapi” by Tom Sachs in March for $380,000. The NFT art is now the company’s Twitter profile picture. In the same month, Alexandre Arnault managed to win bids on three out of the 10 rarest HypeBear NFTs and flipped them for thousands of dollars in profit after allegedly trading with insider information.

Alexandre Arnault’s younger brother, Frédéric Arnault, is the CEO of Tag Heuer. The Swiss luxury watchmaker is set to accept cryptocurrency, which the younger Arnault said would “deeply transform” the industry and beyond.

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