Nic Carter’s Castle Island Ventures Closes $50M Investment Fund

Castle Island Ventures, the early-stage crypto fund helmed by Nic Carter and Matt Walsh, has raised $50 million for its second fund.

“We believe that public blockchains are a transformative technology and will change the way that we interact with money, value transfer, trusted third parties and even the fundamental architecture of the internet itself,” Walsh wrote in an announcement post published Monday.

In a call with CoinDesk, Carter said the fund’s investors include high-net-worth individuals, family offices and others. The firm raised $30 million in June 2018 for its first fund, which invested in 20 startups including BlockFi, ErisX, River Financial and Casa, among others.

“My first love is bitcoin and we’re not abandoning bitcoin,” said Carter, who is also a CoinDesk columnist. “Our focus has always been crypto financial market infrastructure and bitcoin is not the only part of that.”

Carter pointed to the growth of stablecoins and decentralized approaches to internet infrastructure as potential areas of interest for the new $50 million war chest.

“There are adjacencies that are interesting to us,” Carter said. “There’s a slight broadening of our focus to reflect the maturity of that space.”

The second fund will target about 20 startup investments with slightly larger check sizes than the first, Carter added.