Investors in the fund included Bill Ackman.

The debut fund, Shima Capital Fund I , received funding from investors including Dragonfly Capital, Bill Ackman, Animoca, OKex, Mirana Ventures, Republic, and Andrew Yang, among others.

Shima Capital Fund I

The fund will deploy funds to support pre-seed and seed blockchain startups through financing and guidance from its team of seasoned investors, accomplished operators, and former founders who align on a mission to help founder teams build and scale their companies. (CISION PR Newswire)

“As crypto-focused VC’s continue to raise massive billion dollar plus funds, we identified a pocket of opportunity to support Web3 founders with their first institutional checks that are considered too small for other Tier 1 investors,” said Gao, Founder and Managing Partner of Shima Capital. “We also observed that early-stage funds usually do not provide extensive value-adds for founders given limited resources. At Shima, we take the opposite approach and spend the necessary resources to provide our portfolio companies with surgical support typically found only with larger funds. We firmly believe this strategy of focusing on the earliest funding rounds and delivering a full suite of value-adds will yield strong returns for LPs and align incentives the most with founders.”

Funding will be available to early-stage blockchain startups across all verticals with check sizes of $500,000 to $2,000,000.

Areas of focus include but are not limited to consumer (e.g. decentralized identity, social media, content ownership, DAO’s), gaming & metaverse, composable financial systems (e.g. sustainable DeFi, regenerative finance, payments & settlement), decentralized infrastructure (e.g. data platforms, blockchain automation, cross-chain communication), and next-generation blockchain technology (e.g. Layer 1/2, zero-knowledge proofs, security).

“We want to have that margin of safety in our investments,” explained founder and managing partner Yida Gao to CoinDesk. “Investing early and helping the companies with their entire lifecycle of growth allows us to have that margin of safety and have higher, risk-adjusted returns for our limited partners.”

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