Quick take:
- The venture capital firm aims to support the best early-stage web3 projects with capital and mentorship.
- Symbolic’s initial investments include BlinkMoon, Planet Mojo, and Community Gaming.
- Investors in their initial $50M fund include crypto protocols, other T1 VC firms, leading exchanges and others.
Symbolic Capital today announced the launch of an oversubscribed $50 million Web3 fund led by Polygon founder Sandeep Nailwal and ex-Borderless Capital’s and Cere co-founder Kenzi Wang, TechCrunch first reported.
Investors in the $50 million fund include crypto protocols, other tier-1 VC firms, leading exchanges, crypto auditing firms, and crypto vendors as well as a selection of family offices and institutions.
Symbolic Capital is focused on supporting ambitious early-stage Web3 startups from emerging markets with capital and mentorship. As founders with deep roots in the Web3 space, Nailwal and Wang are qualified to identify web3 projects whose solutions will power the decentralised web. Symbolic’s areas of interest include interoperability, metaverse, NFT consumerisation, and creator economy, amongst others.
When asked about how his background as a founder influences his vision for Symbolic, Nailwal said: “We’re specifically focused on supporting founders from emerging markets that have often been passed over by traditional VC. Starting Polygon in India, we struggled to get connected to VCs that believed in our vision and abilities as founders. Our mission with Symbolic is to empower the next generation of emerging founders who have historically been overlooked by the VC industry.”
Nailwal’s role at Polygon has been dedicated to the mass adoption of Web3 while Wang co-founded Cere, a leading decentralised data infrastructure solution. The two met in Binance Labs in 2019, and have co-invested in over 40 companies including Axie Infinity, YGG, Biconomy and many others.
“Symbolic will offer a level of support to our portfolio companies that is unique. We built blockchain companies from the ground up and are intimately familiar with the unique challenges that these projects face. For Web3/token startup, it’s not only about the product and product market fit, it also is about designing sustainable economies with pragmatic tokenomics, building passionate communities around your product before taking your Token public, marketing across Web2 and Web3 both, BD and so much more,” said Nailwal.
Alongside other top-tier venture firms like Sequoia Capital, a16z, Galaxy Digital, Tiger Global, and FTX. Its initial portfolio companies include BlinkMoon, YGG SEA, Syn City and others. Portfolio companies will receive $500,000 to $1 million per project.
To differentiate itself from other Web3-focused venture capital firms, Symbolic Capital will leverage a proprietary data platform to drive its investments and support of portfolio companies. The proprietary data engine will be core to the firm’s operations.
“With the tools we have built, we’ll be able to scrape and analyze data like GitHub contributions, social media traction, Discord engagement, and granular token performance to help drive our investments, as well as tracking things like employment migration trends and job histories to identify and recruit top hires for our portfolio companies,” Nailwal explained.
In addition to financial investment, the firm will also offer advisory, PR/marketing, and auditing services to help its portfolio companies grow.
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