Venture Capital · Profile from Venture Capital Research Companion
Paradigm
The research-driven crypto investment firm founded in 2018 by a Coinbase co-founder and a Sequoia partner, which pairs venture and liquid-token investing with an in-house engineering and research team, and which became the archetype of the "technical" crypto fund — while also absorbing one of the most public losses of the cycle in FTX.
At a glance
- Founded
- 2018 (announced June 2018), San Francisco
- Founders
- Matt Huang (ex-Sequoia Capital partner) and Fred Ehrsam (Coinbase co-founder)
- Headquarters
- San Francisco; small presence in New York and Washington, D.C. (policy)
- Ownership / structure
- Private partnership; manages venture-style funds that can hold equity, locked tokens and liquid crypto assets in one vehicle
- Leadership (2026)
- Matt Huang (co-founder, managing partner; also CEO of Stripe/Paradigm-incubated Tempo since 2025); Fred Ehrsam (co-founder; stepped back from day-to-day investing ~2023–24 and founded neurotech company Nudge — verify current role); partners including Charlie Noyes, Arjun Balaji, Alana Palmedo; CTO/research partner Georgios Konstantopoulos; research partner Dan Robinson; chief legal officer Katie Biber
- AUM / capital raised
- ~$400m initial fund (2018); ~$2.5bn venture fund (Nov 2021); ~$850m fund (June 2024); ~$1.2bn fund (2026, below a reported ~$1.5bn target — verify). Firm-wide AUM implied ~$8.7bn in late 2022 (FTX = 3.2% of assets) and reported ~$12–13bn in 2025
- Stage focus
- Seed to growth, plus liquid tokens; heavy concentration in protocol and infrastructure teams; selective expansion to adjacent "frontier technology" (AI, robotics) from 2023–26
- Signature investments
- StarkWare, Uniswap, Optimism, dYdX, Compound, Lido, Blur, Flashbots, Monad, Kalshi, Tempo (incubated with Stripe); failures/misses: FTX (~$278m written to zero, 2022), Farcaster (returned capital via Neynar takeover, 2026)
10 deals and moves analysed
Each one gets a full strategy file in the companion: context, the decision, the financing, what happened, and the lesson.
2018
StarkWare
Series A
2019
Uniswap
Seed
2020
Optimism
Seed
2021
FTX
Series B / FTX US Series A
2021
dYdX
Series C
2022
Blur
Seed
2024
Farcaster
Series A
2024
Monad
Series A
2025
Kalshi
Series C
2025
Tempo
Incubation and Series A