In 2022, Sequoia has launched a large wave of intensive investment in the field of encrypted finance and Web3 and wants to take the lead in the new generation of Internet concepts.
Venture capital money is pouring into “Web3.”
On March 9, Web3 infrastructure company and electronic agreement signing platform EthSign completed a $12 million seed round, led by Sequoia Capital India (Sequoia Capital India) and Mirana Ventures, Amber Group, Circle Ventures, NGC Ventures, HashKey Group and Matrixport participated.
Notably, according to The Block, a spokesperson for Sequoia Capital India said this is the first time that three units of Sequoia Capital (Sequoia Capital, Sequoia Capital India and Sequoia Capital China) have fully participated in a funding round.
And this is the second Web3 investment that Sequoia has participated in within 3 days.
On March 7, Sequoia Capital participated in the $32 million financing of Espresso Systems, a Web 3 application extension and privacy system. This round of financing was led by Greylock Partners and Electric Capital, with Blockchain Capital and Slow Ventures.
In order not to miss the wave of Web3 and cryptocurrencies, Sequoia Capital has specially prepared an about $500 million investment.
On February 18, Sequoia Capital announced the launch of a cryptocurrency-focused investment fund with a capital size of between $500 million and $600 million. This crypto fund will mainly invest in crypto projects, including those already in crypto. Exchange-listed and unlisted tokens, the investment scale of a single project is between 100,000 and 50 million US dollars, and Sequoia also plans to participate in encrypted finance.
The “Web3” that makes Sequoia Capital, A16z, the world’s most well-known venture capital institutions, is a new outlet that is gradually heating up, but it is not known to the public.
“Web3” is a relative concept, which can be understood as the abbreviation of the new generation of Internet in the popular sense.
Specifically, “Web 3.0” is a derivative of the current Internet’s underlying protocol “World Wide Web”. Within this concept, the Internet has gone through the Web1.0 era, and is currently in the Web2.0 era, while Web3.0 is what people expect from the next-generation Internet, which means that machines can read any information (that is, the Semantic Web). Websites can provide intelligent selection and better information based on information (artificial intelligence), the Internet is ubiquitous (Internet of Things), and more importantly, the ownership of data on the Internet will be decentralized.
This is a very broad concept, and it is also a concept that is constantly evolving. In recent years, with the development of blockchain technology, people have found that blockchain technology and the “Web3” concept are perfectly combined, and they have begun to deploy and try it.
At the end of 2021, there was a debate about “Web3” on social media Twitter. Tesla chairman Elon Musk, who has always been concerned about cryptocurrencies, poured cold water on the concept of “Web3”, saying that it was nothing more than venture capital institutions. Marketing concept.
But money keeps pouring into the space, with $30 billion going into cryptocurrencies in 2021, according to a Coinbase research report, more funding than previous years combined. The Coinbase investment department itself has completed about 150 investment plans, of which the Web field accounts for 20%.
And A16z, one of the largest technology venture capital institutions in the United States, is one of the best among them. According to the CB Insights report, in 2021, 43 companies in A16z’s investment portfolio will appear in the form of listing (IPO) and acquisition (M&A), of which IPO Three times as many as it has ever recorded in any year, it has also accelerated its investment, doubling the number of deals from last year, and shifting its focus to blockchain-related technologies.
In recent years, A16z can be seen in almost all large-scale financings in the Web3 field, and besides investing, they are also actively participating in the popularization of the Web3 concept. Web3″ is right between the letter a and the letter z.
Sequoia Capital, which is also the world’s top venture capital, is half a beat behind A16z in this field, so in the second half of 2021, under the promotion of LP, it started the transformation and officially abandoned the traditional 10-year cycle system in the VC industry.
In addition, in line with A16z, Sequoia also applied to the SEC to become a registered investment advisor (RIA). This gives Sequoia more investment flexibility beyond venture capital restrictions, allowing it t