Luno on the hunt for Web3 startups to invest in
There have been over a dozen $1 billion crypto startups in the last year alone. Luno, a subsidiary of Digital Currency Group (DCG), wants a piece of that, launching Luno Expeditions and looking to back 200+ crypto, DeFi and Web3 startups per year.
Luno is pitching itself to these startups as an opportunity to go global. Because it operates in five continents, startups can leverage Luno to rapidly scale their businesses as the opportunity arises.
Luno Expeditions CEO, Jocelyn Cheng, also has experience in supporting startups in unusual markets. Cheng has worked with startups in sub-Saharan Africa, India, and SE Asia. She has also held roles in Bain Capital and Goldman Sachs.
The parent company, DCG, is already an investor itself, and will continue to do so. Luno Expeditions is an effort to differentiate where the Group makes its investments. DCG will continue to focus on later-stage companies from Series A onwards, and on digital assets. Luno Expeditions will be more experimental, and will invest in early-stage companies across that broad spectrum of crypto, DeFi and Web3 startups.
A Differentiated Investor
In parallel, Luno Expeditions will also be interesting in FinTech startups, Cheng said. “There are very few truly global and very early-stage fintech funds in the world; we see an exciting opportunity here to build one,” she said in an interview on Yahoo! Finance on the project.
“The reason why it’s not just pure crypto is that over the past few years, as operators scaling some of the largest crypto businesses in the world, we have noticed that there is such a strong intersection between some of the traditional FinTechs and crypto.”
Entreprenurs that earn backing from Luno Expeditions will receive between $50,000 and $250,000 in investment money. That means the company is willing to make as much as $75 million in investments each year.
When you look at the investments Luno Expeditions has made early on, it appears that the company wants to be a force for good while making a return. Existing investments include a digital bank for women in Pakistan, a crypto compliance solution in Israel, and various FinTech and crypto exchanges in African nations.