The company closed its latest round of capital in December, attracting marquee investors such as venture giant Marc Andreessen and renowned fintech investor Micky Malka of Ribbit Capital. The fund of funds Cendana has put in $15 million, the largest check in the fund, said Mahesh Ramakrishnan, cofounder of Escape Velocity.

“I think the nature of crypto and making extreme external investments is that there are cycles of feeling very bearish and cycles of feeling very strong,” said Ramakrishnan, as he reaffirmed his belief in decentralized physical infrastructure.

Duplicate the DePIN

Crypto’s key value proposition is decentralization. Founders create financial channels, currencies, and assets that are not controlled by a single party. Others have taken that ideal beyond digital networks to physical ones, dreaming of peer-to-peer services for Wi-Fi, cellphone plans, and more. drones. To encourage people to support these networks, DePIN startups usually pay backers in cryptocurrency.

While the DePIN concept has attracted a lot of attention, it has yet to produce a project that has broken into the mainstream. Ramakrishnan, who was then CEBU as “the DePIN cheerleader,” believed it was only a matter of time.

“A lot of what you’ve seen in the last three years is DePIN projects launching tokens before they have anything—they’re launching tokens based on hype and based on an idea,” he said.

However, Ramakrishnan and his cofounder Salvador Gala, who was named after Forbes’ 30 under 30 financial list, believe they will find decentralized infrastructure projects more than hype.

The couple met as interns at Goldman Sachs. Gala became an investor in Ribbit Capital, the venture investor behind fintech stalwarts such as Robinhood, Revolut, and Coinbase. And Ramakrishnan left Goldman Sachs for the private equity giant Apollo Global Management.

In 2022, two friends, both crypto enthusiasts, decided to launch their own venture fund. “The idea that you can use these cryptographic incentives, and almost tie people into these economic cults, feels like a new thing, where you can build businesses around communities,” Ramakrishnan said.

That year, even with crypto tanking, the duo raised $20 million from top-tier crypto VCs, including the founders of Andreessen Horowitz, Multicoin, and Framework Ventures. Since then they have supported a suite of DePIN companies, such as solar energy startups Daylight and Glow.

While they didn’t distribute meaningful capital back to their limited partners—investors in the fund were committed for 10 years—Ramakrishnan and Gala had enough traction to triple the size of their first fund in their second round.

“We feel they have a real pole position to see some of the best founders and projects being built in the space,” said Graham Pingree, a fund partner at Cendana funds.