Animal Ventures
3739 Balboa Street, Unit 5011, San Francisco, California, 94121, United States
Overview
“By nature, man is a political animal.” In Aristotle’s most well-known observation, “political” means the capacity for speech and reason. This has led to humans becoming social and technological animals, inventing and disseminating new kinds of tools that fundamentally alter our world and our engagement with it. It is what has moved the species along. From fire to Facebook. Today, as in the past, technological inventions are reshaping human life. Many of our conceptions of what work looks like, how we communicate and trade, and even what constitutes a human being are unravelling before our eyes due to advances in technology. And now, more than ever, we need to leverage the Aristotelian part of our animal nature to build forward with purpose. Animal Ventures is a venture studio and consultancy focused on helping clients best adapt to the changing technological landscape. We help build startups, educate executives, and design comprehensive strategies to help corporate, government, and nonprofit clients take advantage some of the most advanced technologies coming to market, among them blockchain, artificial intelligence, digital platforms, and the Internet of Things. Animal Ventures is the umbrella entity that co-founders Tom Serres and Bettina Warburg created for the projects they are working on at the intersection of technology, politics, and broader societal change. Its teams are formed from an extensive network of professional peers, who take on projects germane to their areas of expertise and that require new thinking. Animal Ventures innovates with client companies and governments to develop minimum viable products and comprehensive strategies for innovation across technologies
- Total investments
- 3
- Lead investments
- 0
- Investments · 12mo
- 0
- Active investors
- 3
Sector focus
- Artificial Intelligence (AI)
- Consulting
- Information Services
- Information Technology
- Location Based Services
- Service Industry
- Software
Investment portfolio
- Astar Network
Participated · Equity · Jan 2022
Astar Network is a parachain on the Polkadot network that supplies smart contract functionality which Polkadot’s relay chain does not natively support. The network offers developer incentives through its #Build2Earn protocol, paying contributors in ASTR tokens for building smart contracts and infrastructure. Astar received $22 million in strategic funding to support its planned geographical expansion. The funding round included leading crypto venture firms and a broader group of ecosystem investors, indicating continued VC interest in Polkadot-layer projects. Astar’s core product centers on enabling smart-contract developers on Polkadot and fostering on-chain developer activity via token rewards. No operating metrics (revenue/users) or prior financings were mentioned in the article.
- Decentology
Participated · Seed · Oct 2021
Decentology develops Hyperverse, an open, composable marketplace that aims to let developers discover, build and monetize web3 applications across multiple blockchains. Hyperverse is blockchain-agnostic and positioned as the evolution of DappStarter, Decentology’s code-generation platform for web2 developers moving into web3. The company plans to add Flow, Algorand and Ethereum to Hyperverse and to add additional chains following a future token sale. Decentology intends to transition governance to a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) using a community governance model to manage future growth and development. The company is led by co-founder and CEO Nik Kalyani and is based in Mountain View, California. Financially, Decentology secured $4.3M in seed funding to support these product and expansion plans.
- NEAR
Participated · Equity · May 2020
NEAR’s core product is NEAR Protocol, a public, sharded proof-of-stake blockchain that uses a consensus mechanism called Nightshade to achieve high throughput and predictable costs for decentralized applications. By offering features such as meta-transactions, contract-based accounts and gas-fee rebates at the protocol level, NEAR aims to make dApps almost as easy to build and use as traditional web apps. The company is led by competitive programming champions and veterans from Google, Facebook, Niantic and MemSQL; co-founder and CEO Alex Skidanov was MemSQL’s first employee, while CTO Illia Polosukhin contributed to Google’s TensorFlow. NEAR has launched a beta program to onboard a cohort of projects expected to deploy on the platform later this year. Fresh capital will be directed toward hiring additional engineers, expanding developer tooling and bringing the mainnet to market. Although no revenue or user figures were disclosed, the team emphasizes scalability and mainstream adoption as key objectives. Once launched, the protocol is intended to remove theoretical limits on network capacity by parallelizing computation across shards.