A Bushwick-based venture capital fund with $50 million to spend talks about blockchain
While the value of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin has been notoriously volatile, the growth of mainstream interest in developing applications for the underlying blockchain technology has been much steadier. That’s why the Bushwick-based blockchain dynamo ConsenSys launched a $50 million venture fund last September, called ConsenSys Ventures, to grow the market around Ethereum, the blockchain platform it uses to develop applications.
ConsenSys has grown at a head-spinning pace, with more than 1,100 employees on six continents and 50-plus projects under way. With ConsenSys Ventures, the intent is to fund and guide promising new projects in their early days and help blockchain technology mature more rapidly. The woman chosen to run this ambitious new organization is managing partner Kavita Gupta, an alumna of MIT, McKinsey, the World Bank, HSBC and the International Finance Corp., who most recently worked in mission-driven investing for the family foundation of Eric Schmidt, the former executive chairman of Google.
Gupta recently took an hour during a breakneck international travel schedule — that month she was in Switzerland, China, Israel and California — to talk with The Bridge about why investing in blockchain is so exhilarating, and to explain what she’s looking for when choosing new blockchain projects to fund.