United States, Dec. 15, 2020 /AlexaBlockchain/ – Bloccelerate VC has closed a $12 million Fund I to support the enterprise and institutional adoption of blockchain technology.
Founded in 2018, Bloccelerate VC is a Seattle-based VC firm which focuses on early-stage investments in blockchain technology startups. The company is led by General Partners Kate Mitselmakher and Sam Yilmaz. Having personally experienced the volatility of the emerging market economies, both Mitselmakher and Yilmaz have developed an appreciation for the disruptive potential of blockchain in the financial world.
Professionally, Mitselmakher brings a decade-long expertise in the enterprise technology space, having worked for a global publicly traded technology market research firm, Gartner (NYSE: IT). Yilmaz brings operational know-how and entrepreneurial expertise, having started and exited an AI company, prior to co-founding the Decentralized Application Fund in 2014. The DApps Fund divested all of its assets in 2017 — at the peak of the blockchain hype cycle.
The Bloccelerate VC fund is actively investing in blockchain-powered applications that enable trustless automation of business processes within trillion-dollar industries — such as trade finance, financial services, and supply chain. The fund has already deployed capital into 5 companies, including Blockapps, Symbiont, MakerDAO.
Over the next 2-3 years, Bloccelerate has planned to invest into 10-15 emerging winners in the blockchain space. Bloccelerate invests in Seed, Series A, and Series B stage companies through its main fund, along with a co-investment vehicle. The average investment amount ranges from $500K-$2million.
While the recent adoption of digital assets by institutional investors has been great for the blockchain industry as a whole, Mitselmakher and Yilmaz firmly believe that many still misinterpret blockchain by deeming it primarily restricted to payments, or “money-as-a-service” use cases. In reality, blockchain has numerous other applications.
In fact, by 2030, Gartner estimates that the business value added by blockchain will surge to exceed over $3.1 trillion, with the vast majority of value created in use cases outside of “digital gold” (Source). Large Fortune 500 companies — like Walmart, Bayer, Vanguard, Anheuser Busch, and others — all announced successful blockchain implementations. Mitselmakher believes that “the era of futile experimentation is behind us, as a larger number of POCs are successfully going to production.”
Bloccelerate’s investment thesis specifically focuses on revenue-generating use cases that enable trustless “consensus over the wire” for multiple stakeholders who do not necessarily know or trust each other. Examples from Bloccelerate portfolio include BlockApps’s solution tracking multiple billions of dollars worth of highest-value stewarded products for Bayer Crop Sciences (Source), and Symbiont’s solution successfully managing $1.3+ trillion worth of passive index data for Vanguard (Source). Bloccelerate VC believes that, ultimately, blockchain solves the “single source of truth” problem – permeating virtually every sector and every geography.