Crypto VC firm Archetype closes $100M early-stage fund

Crypto venture capital company Archetype said it closed over $100 million in total capital commitments for its third fund, Archetype III.

The new fund is backed by institutional investors including pensions, academic endowments, funds of funds, sovereign wealth funds and family offices, the company said in a press release on Tuesday.

Archetype’s funds are behind crypto companies such as Monad, Privy, Farcaster, Relay and Ritual. The company targets early-stage startups building onchain infrastructure, decentralized finance (DeFi) and emerging blockchain applications.

The capital will be deployed on projects working on stablecoins, payment solutions, onchain social networks, decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePIN), mobile apps built on crypto rails and crypto AI.

“Blockchains are becoming the commerce rails of the world, and crypto’s ChatGPT moment is set to emerge atop uniquely performant onchain infrastructure and a powerful new class of creator tooling,” Ash Egan, founder and general partner at Archetype said in the release.

Related: Ripple stablecoin added as off-ramp for BlackRock and VanEck tokenized funds

Investors turn to proven models

Venture capital’s move into crypto has produced mixed results. In May, crypto venture activity fell to its lowest deal count in more than four years, with only 62 rounds completed, even though those raises totaled more than $909 million.

This selectivity has carried into the broader market, with companies shifting away from the pre-seed bets and memecoin frenzies of the 2021 bull run toward projects with proven business models and predictable revenue.

As Cointelegraph reported in July, interest in Bitcoin-focused projects increased, with the emerging Bitcoin DeFi sector raising $175 million across 32 deals in the first half of 2025.

At the same time, venture funds channelled capital into tokenization and stablecoin infrastructure. Deals included $28 million for Stable, a Tether-focused blockchain to expand USDt payments, and $22 million for Spiko, a French fintech offering tokenized money market funds.

Inveniam Capital, a provider of decentralized data infrastructure, also invested $20 million into the layer-1 blockchain Mantra to support bringing institutional real-world assets (RWAs) onto the network.

Venture capital investment in crypto totaled $10.03 billion in the second quarter of 2025, the highest level since Q1 2022 at $16.64 billion.

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