axiom seeking to raise $75m for second venture fund
We founded Axiom on the back of a simple realization. Cofounders Allen Farrington and Anders Larson were long-time Bitcoiners working in asset management roles, and had tracked the growth of Bitcoin, the asset, across many years. While price was the most obvious measure of success and adoption, at that time we began to notice the sprouts of an exciting and robust economy around Bitcoin, the network, as well. In short, we realized that there was a real opportunity to make venture investments focused on the Bitcoin ecosystem. The network, the infrastructure, and the community were all mature enough to support such a specialized avenue for capital allocation.
For all these positives, the greatest attraction was that the wider world had no idea. Worse even than ignorance, at the time many were enamored with nonsensical boondoggles and scams. Indeed, it was while writing Only The Strong Survive across the summer of 2021 that we started to realize how misunderstood the Bitcoin opportunity really was.
We got Axiom up and running at almost the precise moment everything we warned about in Only The Strong Survive came true; interlocking schemes of pointless and self-referential securitization, rehypothecation, and leverage, with no productive capital supporting this caricature of financialization, came crashing down to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars in nominal value destroyed. There was certainly a bittersweet feeling in getting cold receptions for our inaugural fundraising effort because of exactly what we said was going to happen.
Not to be deterred, we raised and deployed our first fund with investments spanning 2022-2024. We couldn’t be prouder of the teams we have backed, building through the bear market and coming out stronger. In many cases, those teams were running the infrastructure that newer companies rely on for their own products or services: exactly our initial thesis.
With Bitcoin seemingly heading into its quadrennial bull market, with new opportunities appearing faster than ever, and with Fund 1 investments likely seeking additional capital in the not-too-distant future, we are excited to announce that we are seeking to raise $75m for our second venture fund.
Our thesis is straightforward: Bitcoin is the most important innovation in our lifetime and it will eventually touch every process in finance, energy, and software. In order to reach this level of adoption, normalization, and even obfuscation, a vast amount of infrastructure will have to be built. The companies that build this successfully will be enabling the transition to a Bitcoin standard, and therefore will be the first to make this transition themselves. Any positive return these companies generate will, by definition, outperform Bitcoin. We believe that a well-run, diligent, and concentrated allocation to the best companies building on Bitcoin is amongst the best long-term investment one can make besides Bitcoin itself, and in our view, the best way to positively impact Bitcoin’s appreciation is to make exactly this investment.
Furthermore, we believe this is not at all well understood. The wider traditional finance community may have become temporarily excited by ETFs, but most couldn’t tell you the first thing about Lightning, mining, or Nostr, amongst many other avenues of frenetic innovation. In our minds, this underscores the imperative for Bitcoin founders to raise capital prudently. In our view, nothing will destroy a Bitcoin company faster than an investor pressuring the founding team to issue a token. We believe that this is the core of our competitive advantage: we are respected not only as Bitcoin investors, but as Bitcoiners.
We are therefore excited to be bringing on Matt Kita as general partner, James O’Beirne as technical advisor, and Adam Back as strategic advisor. Matt has extensive experience in fintech with FIS and Worldpay, and in Bitcoin with BitGo and Cathedra, where he is now a board member. James O’Beirne is a long-time Bitcoin Core contributor and currently a senior engineer at NYDIG. Adam Back surely needs no introduction, but in case the reader is unaware, he is the co-founder and CEO of Blockstream, as well as the inventor of HashCash, a proof-of-work algorithm cited by Satoshi Nakamoto in the Bitcoin white paper and integral to the protocol’s design.
As we grow Fund 2, we look forward to adding additional intellectual firepower to our team, to understanding the continued development of infrastructure extending Bitcoin’s utility, and, of course, in backing new companies beyond those from Fund 1. If you would like to be a part of what we are building, please contact us here.
Axiom
July 2024
This communication is not an offer to sell or invest in a strategy or investment vehicle (each a “Fund”) managed or sponsored by Axiom Venture Management LLC or its affiliates (“Axiom”), or any other security. Such an offer will only be made pursuant to the delivery of the related organizational and offering documents for a Fund (the “Organizational Documents”), which will be furnished to qualified investors only. The information contained herein does not purport to be complete and is qualified in its entirety by the applicable Organizational Documents.
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