Synopsis
Former prosecutor Katie Haun has secured $1 billion for new venture funds, focusing on crypto and blockchain companies, with a strategic blend of AI and financial services. Her firm, Haun Ventures, aims for global investments, leveraging her unique background in law enforcement and tech to navigate evolving markets and policy landscapes, despite past industry volatility.Listen to this article in summarized format
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“There are deep, transformational shifts going on within technology,” she said in an interview. “One of those is AI; another one is digital assets.” The evolution of Haun Ventures mirrors a shift in the wider venture landscape, as investors confront ongoing volatility in the crypto sector and strong demand for artificial intelligence. Paradigm, one of the largest crypto-focused VC firms, recently expanded to bet on artificial intelligence and robotics.
Haun, for her part, said her firm remains focused on crypto and financial services, and is less interested in backing the AI labs and application companies that have captivated her peers in Silicon Valley. “We’re not pivoting to be an AI fund,” she said. “We want to do AI that is in our lane.”
As an example, she said Haun Ventures may fund startups developing AI agents or infrastructure that help consumers and businesses get access to financial products at any time — and do away with some quirks in the financial system that she considers to be outdated, such as deadlines for wiring money. She has already started making investments behind this thesis, becoming one of the largest investors in Erebor, a digital bank founded by Anduril Industries Inc. founder Palmer Luckey. Erebor was most recently valued at more than $4 billion.Haun has long been viewed as a contrarian in the venture world. When she launched her first $1.5 billion set of funds to back crypto and blockchain companies in 2022, many were surprised to see her abandon her powerful perch at Andreessen Horowitz — where she was the first female general partner — and because of general shakiness in the cryptocurrency market.Months after Haun’s firm announced the fund, cryptocurrency exchange FTX collapsed, an event that Haun described as a “seismic shift in how the entire industry was perceived.”
Haun Ventures had not invested in FTX, but she said it set the industry back “a number of years.”Haun and her small team deployed their first funds cautiously when writing new checks. Those deals have led to notable wins. Last year, Stripe acquired stablecoin platform Bridge for $1.1 billion, a significant uptick from the $100 million it was valued at when Haun Ventures invested. About a year after that deal closed, another stablecoin company, BVNK, sold to Mastercard Inc. for about $1.8 billion. Haun Ventures first invested in BVNK at a $678 million valuation. Not all of the firm’s bets have panned out, however. Haun Ventures invested in the once buzzy NFT marketplace OpenSea in a round that valued the company at $13.3 billion. A top investor in the company later marked down the valuation of OpenSea to $1.4 billion.
Still, Accolade Partners founder Joelle Kayden, a limited partner in Haun Ventures’ fund, said Haun’s firm has navigated crypto’s many downturns well.
Kayden specifically pointed to the firm’s early stablecoin investments as well as its strategy around staking, and buying and selling tokens, which led to profits for investors. Haun Ventures has bought up distressed crypto assets at a discount, allowing the firm to sell a strip of some of those digital assets at peak prices in 2025, thereby returning capital to investors, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. Haun’s new fund is slightly smaller than the last because the team expects less dramatic changes to liquid token prices, Kayden said. Haun put about half of her debut later-stage fund into digital assets, such as Bitcoin and Solana.
As Haun kicks off the new fund, she’s betting her experience in Washington will be a key differentiator — particularly at a moment when public policy is top of mind for crypto and AI firms.
Haun previously worked as a federal prosecutor at the Department of Justice, including serving as an assistant US Attorney in San Francisco, where she served as what she describes as the first-ever digital currency coordinator. One of her first tasks, she said, was to pursue crypto-using criminals.
The experience gave her a useful Rolodex for politics and tech. In 2015, for example, she helped host a West Coast Digital Currency Summit on behalf of the DOJ, with a guest list featuring staff from Peter Thiel’s Mithril Capital Management and the Securities and Exchange Commission. A decade later, that network is helpful for getting founders in front of deep-pocketed sovereign wealth funds, into dinners with the likes of Meta Platforms Inc. President Dina Powell McCormick, or into confabs at Formula 1 races in Singapore and Abu Dhabi. “The East Coast and the West Coast, they need translation between them,” said Coinbase Global Inc. Chief Executive Officer Brian Armstrong, who worked closely with Haun while she served on his company’s board and who is an investor in her funds. “She is one of those rare individuals who can speak about Silicon Valley and finance and government.” While some venture capitalists have cozied up to the Trump administration with the hope that it will be better for crypto and AI, Haun doesn’t see the benefit in publicly aligning with one political party over another.“The fact of the matter is that Chuck Schumer has sat down in my conference room, but so has the Senate banking Chair,” she said. “We work with all sides of the aisle — and I think that’s really important.”
