Family office to anchor fund investing in firms transitioning to Web3

Dunhill Family Office is joining forces with Mocha Ventures to lead a 30 million euro fund set to invest in traditional companies moving into the Web3 space.

The London-based family office and its advisory arm are contributing 3 million euros to the fund. It so far has two commitments from family offices in the UK and EU, said Mocha Ventures General Partner Renato Brioni, who did not name the firms.

Mocha Ventures, a regulated digital assets fund in the EU, operates under the Liechtenstein Blockchain Act. The regulation, passed in 2019, was designed to create an innovation-friendly framework for rendering services on so-called “trustworthy technologies” systems.

Dunhill Ventures — the advisory division of Dunhill Family Office — is set to assist Mocha Ventures in raising the rest of the money through its “inner circle” of family offices by the end of the year, the companies said Tuesday.

Offering bespoke finance products, Dunhill Ventures co-invests with other family offices into disruptive tech and blockchain-focused deals. It lists crypto, the metaverse and NFTs as some of its areas of focus.

But the company is set to move away from some of those segments to differentiate itself from other blockchain-related funds, according to Brioni.

“Unlike many funds in the space, we will shift our investment target from NFTs, metaverses, and gaming to [business-to-business] Web2 companies,” he told Blockworks. “Our priority is to work with traditional companies looking to enter Web3 and solving real-life issues.”

Brioni said he expects layer-1 infrastructure, DeFi protocols in emerging markets and zero-knowledge proof projects as segments that could see the largest scalability.

“In the current environment, tangible utility is the key prerequisite for growth,” he added. “Web2 companies with clear use cases have immense potential to evolve into Web3 and scale rapidly via existing sales channels.”

The family office’s interest in crypto’s underlying technology comes as investment in the segment across such wealth management firms is mixed.

Though 26% of family offices are invested in crypto, a May Goldman Sachs report found — up from 16% in 2021 — those that show no interest in entering the space have grown from 39% to 62% in the last two years.

A separate study commissioned by capital markets firm Ocorian, which included 134 family office professionals managing roughly $62.4 billion in assets, found 90% noticed a client-driven push to include crypto in their investment strategies. Amy Collins, Ocorian’s family office head, noted, however, that 80% of respondents labeled the lack of adequate regulatory and reporting support as a challenge.

“This partnership underscores our dedication to identifying transformative technologies and supporting visionary entrepreneurs who are reshaping the future generation,” Dunhill Family Office Principal Piers Dunhill said in a statement.

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