Paradigm Drops $1.2B Fund, Tells Crypto It's Still the One While Hugging AI 🤖

Crypto venture firm Paradigm has raised $1.2 billion for a new fund that will invest across artificial intelligence, robotics and digital assets, the company said Wednesday. The vehicle is the firm's fourth fund and follows a $2.5 billion crypto fund raised in November 2021 and an $850 million early-stage blockchain fund raised in 2024, bringing total capital raised across Paradigm's three prior funds to more than $4 billion.

Managing partner Alana Palmedo framed the expansion as a continuation rather than a pivot. "Crypto was the first frontier for us, and it continues to be a really exciting one, but there's so much else happening right now that's pretty hard to ignore," Palmedo told Bloomberg. On X, she added: "$1.2B to invest in steep exponentials. 8 years ago we were backed by people who believed in the crypto frontier. Now we're doubling down as frontiers are colliding across AI, crypto, space, deep tech, energy."

Paradigm has already deployed capital from the new fund into autonomous drone delivery company Zipline International, which was valued at $7.6 billion in January, and space defense startup True Anomaly, which reached a $2.2 billion valuation in April. Other disclosed investments include robotic metal fabrication platform SendCutSend and AI company Nous Research, the developer of the open-source Hermes Agent model. The firm said it would "continue to research and build where it accelerates" the crypto industry, pointing to internal projects including Ethereum development tools Foundry and Reth, blockchain security benchmark EVMbench developed with OpenAI, and AI agent project Centaur.

On the crypto side, Paradigm highlighted investments in decentralized perpetuals exchange Hyperliquid, prediction market platform Kalshi, and Tempo, a stablecoin-focused blockchain co-founded with Stripe. The firm said its approach is to "stay close to the metal–researching, building, and investing alongside founders, first in crypto, and now across AI, robotics, and other frontiers."

The move comes as crypto venture funding has cooled while AI investment has accelerated. Global venture funding hit a record $510 billion in the first half of 2026, surpassing the $440 billion deployed across all of 2025, according to Crunchbase data published July 2, with OpenAI and Anthropic together accounting for more than 40% of that total. Crypto funding reached $10.8 billion in the same period, per Cryptorank. Other crypto-native investors have followed similar trajectories: Framework Ventures raised $400 million in June for a fund covering crypto, AI, robotics and energy, and Haun Ventures raised $1 billion in May to back crypto startups while expanding into AI for the first time.

Paradigm was founded in 2018 by Matt Huang and Coinbase co-founder Fred Ehrsam. In a June 2023 post on X, Huang said the firm had "never been more dedicated to crypto" while describing advances in artificial intelligence as "too interesting to ignore," rejecting the framing of crypto and AI as "a zero-sum competition" and predicting "plenty of overlap" between the two.