• Nscale

  Participated · Series A · Dec 2024

  Nscale builds and operates vertically integrated AI data centers, controlling everything from renewable energy sourcing and facility construction to the compute stack and orchestration layer. Backed by Nvidia, the company is developing ‘Stargate Norway,’ an installation targeting 100,000 Nvidia GPUs by the end of 2026 with OpenAI as an initial customer. In October it also partnered with Microsoft and Dell to deploy roughly 200,000 Nvidia GPUs across four data centers in Europe and the U.S. The firm positions itself as a low-cost, green alternative for AI compute, pledging to reuse waste heat and invest in local skills and infrastructure. Its latest funding round values the company at $14.6 billion, placing it among Europe’s few AI decacorns. Nscale plans to use the new capital to accelerate build-outs in Europe, North America and Asia while expanding its engineering and operations teams. The company has hinted at a possible IPO as early as this year to further bolster its capital base. High-profile board appointments—including Sheryl Sandberg, Susan Decker and Nick Clegg—underscore its growing prominence.

• OrdinalsBot

  Participated · Seed · Mar 2024

  OrdinalsBot builds infrastructure and developer tools for the Bitcoin Ordinals ecosystem, including an inscription tool, the Scribe on-chain blogging platform, and a premium API for analytics, collection management and marketplace integration. The team launched as the first automated inscription service in the Bitcoin Ordinals space and has expanded into features for collection mints, BRC-20 launches, lazy minting, and complex indexing such as parent-child hierarchies. OrdinalsBot plans to launch a Trio Marketplace to centralize Ordinals access and will ramp up hiring across functions with a focus on BTC developers. The company says the new capital will help reset dynamics and infrastructure within blockchain to bring new opportunities to the Ordinals and BTC ecosystem. Financially, OrdinalsBot completed an oversubscribed $3M+ seed round as a fast follow to a pre-seed raised less than five months earlier, bringing total funding to over $4.5M. The announcement was released from London. OrdinalsBot builds ordinals infrastructure and recently launched a Software Developer Kit (SDK) to help developers integrate ordinals functionality into their projects. The company says the SDK enables companies and individuals to store data on Bitcoin and serves as a building block for Web3. OrdinalsBot was founded in February 2023 by Brian Laughlan and Toby Lewis and is based in the UK. The startup raised more than $1 million in a Seed funding round to improve ordinals infrastructure. Founders stated the funding and investor support will help them become a premier Bitcoin infra company. The company emphasized renewed developer interest in the space as a catalyst for its plans.

• NodeShift

  Participated · Seed · Feb 2024

  NodeShift aggregates excess data-center and decentralized web3 capacity, offering a single API for compute, storage and GPU access. The company says it can deliver prices 70–80% cheaper than traditional cloud providers and offers access to Nvidia A100s and consumer RTX 4090 GPUs. It pairs certified data centers (Uptime Institute, SOC 2, ISO 27000) that can provide SLAs with web3 supply to enable low-cost bursting and spot-like instances. NodeShift reports access to about 400,000 CPUs and 28 million terabytes of storage. The team plans to launch a Kubernetes platform to orchestrate workloads across its supply and will use new funding to build out supply and go-to-market efforts. Competitors mentioned in the article include Impossible Cloud (storage) and Salad (AI/ML on consumer-grade hardware).

• Arkon Energy

  Participated · Equity · Dec 2023

  Arkon Energy acquires distressed data center assets and operates power-dense infrastructure that appeals to bitcoin miners and AI/machine learning clients. Launched in 2021 with a 5-megawatt site in Australia, the company has grown to over 130 megawatts and expanded into the U.S. and Europe. Arkon positions itself as a landlord that owns underlying infrastructure assets, with its U.S. portfolio largely occupied by institutional-grade bitcoin mining companies. The company closed a $110 million private funding round led by Bluesky Capital Management with participation from Kestrel 0x1 and Nural Capital. About $80 million of the proceeds will be used to acquire an additional 200 megawatts across new data centers in Ohio, North Carolina and Texas to increase total megawatts by 130% by mid-2024; Arkon also purchased a 100-megawatt facility in Ohio in June. The remaining $30 million will fund development of an AI cloud service at its Norway data center to serve generative AI and large language model training markets.

• D3

  Participated · Seed · Sep 2023

  D3 is building the world's first DomainFi network on the Doma Protocol, a purpose-built blockchain that maps DNS state and tokenizes existing and future domains. The platform aims to unlock liquidity and new financial products for the $340B+ domain industry by enabling fractional ownership, domain-based lending, and enhanced digital identity and branding. Doma Protocol is designed to meet ICANN compliance requirements and to bridge DNS with Web3 name systems, simplifying registry and registrar operations like renewals, transfers, and management. D3 plans to integrate with major blockchains and partners (including Solana and Avalanche) and to work with domain industry operators to onboard registries and registrars. The company highlights tokenization of 362M+ existing and future domains and seeks to democratize domain ownership for billions of Internet users. D3 raised a $25M Series A to accelerate development of DomainFi infrastructure and onboarding programs. D3 develops Web3 top-level domains (TLDs) designed to interoperate natively with existing Web2 DNS domains using patent-pending technology. Its core product aims to let users register, trade, and use domains across browsers, email services, and wallets without SDKs or APIs. The company is building an on-chain marketplace to tokenize and trade legacy TLDs, targeting more than 1,000 TLDs including .COM, .NET, and .XYZ to improve liquidity and reduce friction in domain transactions. D3 plans to apply for new TLDs under ICANN’s upcoming application process and has formed partnerships with prominent Web3 ecosystems. Founded in May 2023, the team collectively has over 30 years of domain and internet-protocol experience and is led by co‑founder and CEO Fred Hsu. The company announced a $5M seed funding round to advance its technology and marketplace initiatives.

No current team members are available.