Polychain Capital (Polychain) is an American

investment firm An investment company is a financial institution principally engaged in holding, managing and investing securities. These companies in the United States are regulated by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and must be registered under the ...

based in

San Francisco, California San Francisco (; Spanish for " Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the fourth most populous in California and 17th ...

. The firm focuses on investments related to

cryptocurrency A cryptocurrency, crypto-currency, or crypto is a digital currency designed to work as a medium of exchange through a computer network that is not reliant on any central authority, such as a government or bank, to uphold or maintain it. It i ...

and

blockchain A blockchain is a type of distributed ledger technology (DLT) that consists of growing lists of records, called ''blocks'', that are securely linked together using cryptography. Each block contains a cryptographic hash of the previous block, a ...

technology.

Background

Polychain Capital was founded in 2016 by

Olaf Carlson-Wee Olaf Carlson-Wee (born 1989) is an American entrepreneur and the CEO of cryptocurrency fund Polychain Capital, which he founded in 2016. He was the first employee of Coinbase. Carlson-Wee was named in the ''Forbes'' 30 Under 30 list in 2018. C ...

. Prior to founding Polychain, Carlson-Wee was an employee of

Coinbase Coinbase Global, Inc., branded Coinbase, is an American publicly traded company that operates a cryptocurrency exchange platform. Coinbase is a distributed company; all employees operate via remote work and the company lacks a physical headquar ...

where he was Head of Risk. Investors of Polychain include

Andreessen Horowitz Andreessen Horowitz (also called a16z, legal name AH Capital Management, LLC) is a private American venture capital firm, founded in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. The company is headquartered in Menlo Park, California. Andreessen ...

Sequoia Capital Sequoia Capital is an American venture capital firm. The firm is headquartered in Menlo Park, California, and specializes in seed stage, early stage, and growth stage investments in private companies across technology sectors. , Sequoia's total a ...

Union Square Ventures Union Square Ventures (USV) is an American venture capital firm based in New York City. The firm has backed more than 130 startups, including Twitter, Etsy, Stripe, Coinbase, Zynga, Tumblr, Stack Overflow, Meetup, Kickstarter, MongoDB, Flurry, ...

and

Founders Fund Founders Fund is a San Francisco-based venture capital firm. Formed in 2005, Founders Fund had more than $11 billion in aggregate capital under management as of 2022. The firm invests across all stages and sectors, including aerospace, artificia ...

. In January 2018, the firm considered holding an

initial public offering An initial public offering (IPO) or stock launch is a public offering in which shares of a company are sold to institutional investors and usually also to retail (individual) investors. An IPO is typically underwritten by one or more investment ...

on the

Toronto Stock Exchange The Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX; french: Bourse de Toronto) is a stock exchange located in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It is the 10th largest exchange in the world and the third largest in North America based on market capitalization. Based in t ...

to raise $325 million but eventually decided not to proceed with it. The firm claimed $1 billion assets at the start of 2018 but dropped to $591.5 million as of the end of 2018, majorly due to the drop in the value of its holdings. Companies that Polychain Capital has invested in include

Kik Messenger Kik Messenger, commonly called Kik, is a freeware instant messaging mobile app from the Canada, Canadian company Kik Interactive, available on iOS and Android (operating system), Android operating systems. The application uses a smartphone's int ...

and

Tezos Tezos is an open-source blockchain that can execute peer-to-peer transactions and serve as a platform for deploying smart contracts. The native cryptocurrency for the Tezos blockchain is the tez (ISO 4217: XTZ; sign: ꜩ). The Tezos network achi ...

References

{{authority control Financial services companies established in 2016 Companies based in San Francisco Hedge funds