Stanford Alumni Launch $28 Million Fund to Incubate Web3 Startups

Stanford University’s prestigious graduate students have announced a $28 million fund to support Web3 startups. Named Blockchain Builders, the venture fund embedded in the Stanford blockchain ecosystem has successfully closed its pre-seed and seed-stage fundraising for Fund I.

The fund will invest in Stanford’s pioneering crypto community and exceptional founders from other top institutions. Stanford graduate students Gil Rosen, Kun Peng, and Steven Willinger founded the fund, deploying over $16 million in 40 blockchain ventures spanning AI, Infrastructure, Defi, DePIN, Payments, and RWAs. 

Following this, the eight-year-old Fund I is set to deploy the remaining funds by the end of the year to support multiple projects, many of which are preparing for their token generation events (TGE).

Some of the top portfolio companies involved are AI blockchain 0G (Hack VC, Bankless, Delphi Digital), supercomputer venture Nexus Labs (Lightspeed, Pantera, Dragonfly), open-access AI cloud Hyperbolic (Variant, Polychain, Topology), and blockless Layer-1 Pod (a16z, 1kx).

Commenting, Co-founder Kun Peng said: 

“Blockchain Builders was born from our firsthand experience scaling the Stanford blockchain ecosystem. We started Stanford’s Blockchain Accelerator, teach MS&E 447 Blockchain Entrepreneurship, and produce the Blockchain Application Stanford Summit (BASS) conference series – these initiatives have supported over 200 founders, 400 students, and nearly 5000 cumulative attendees, and provide a deep network to inspire, support, and mentor new founders for success.”

The fund brings some of the best talents and experience to the crypto and tradfi industries. Willinger, the head of Coinbase Ventures, invested at Capital One Ventures, and worked in product and partnerships at Blockstream and Google / Google X. 

Similarly, Rosen is a prolific angel investor who bootstrapped a 100-employee venture, building distributed computer infrastructure for JPMorgan, the London Stock Exchange, and the IRS before moving to the AI platform NGData. Peng is an experienced founder in Web3 spanning crypto analytics and indexing, NFT, DeFi, and infrastructure.

Gil Rosen said:

“Our deep Stanford ties give us early access to high potential founders who value our hands-on approach. We roll up our sleeves and dive into the details of strategy, GTM, and fundraising – positioning them optimally for competitive follow-on rounds led by tier-1 investors.”

Having concluded this phase, the team is looking forward to Fund II, which will enable it to extend its support nationwide to cover the new IC3-Cornell accelerator, which includes Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon, Princeton, Yale, and UCL. They are also working on thought-leading events with the Ethereum Foundation, Solana, Starkware, BASE (Coinbase), and more in the near future.