Below is a brief review of FunFair Ventures since its inception in early 2022, after being established as the newest part of the FunFair Technologies group.
We set up FunFair Ventures as a privately funded business looking to plug a gap in venture capital by helping early stage blockchain projects, with funding and structured support and advisory. Our support capabilities stem from our skills and considerable experience in web2 and web3. Our web3 story goes back to 2016 when FunFair Technologies started developing, launching, operating and marketing our own successful decentralised applications and running a top 100 token economy, post an ICO in 2017.
It’s been a common theme for projects and VCs to let us know that “you guys are OGs”.
In terms of the venture’s journey we started to make investments in late 2021, informally and without a venture brand behind us. The market was so buoyant though we were missing out on rounds. Common threads were, How big is their fund? Their brand doesn’t add value to the cap table, do they have seven figure follow-on money for series A?
So, in early 2022 we decided to formally develop the FunFair Ventures business focused on helping projects with capital and hands-on support.
2022…. What a year to start a venture business. No-one would have predicted how 2022 would pan out and how the market would be affected. Of course the main protagonists were War, LUNA/UST and FTX, which all chipped away, with a pick axe, at market confidence with money flying out of crypto accordingly.
Of course many started tightening their belts. For us as a smaller ventures business the downturn in the market has had a two fold impact on our business, both positive and negative.
Positive in that we are now getting access to great quality projects at more realistic valuations and we’re able to structure advisory into our deals. Focusing on those building in the bear market, it’s a bit of a cliche, but the downturn has focused teams on delivering value, rather than noise.
Negative in that many projects are finding it increasingly difficult to raise extra capital to get to the next level.
2022 has been a great year to learn and we’ve learned a huge amount in prospecting, executing and supporting deals which we think puts us in great stead for the future.
We’ve closed on fourteen deals in total, twelve in 2022 with a mix of equity, equity + tokens and token only. Our verticals cover gaming, defi, cefi, infrastructure, metaverse & NFT’s. Nine of our most recent deals have hands-on support specifically structured into the agreements covering technology, product, corporate, commercial, operations and token economy. We have always invested early and 6 of our deals are now post revenue. No exits yet, but it’s very early days and well, we are in a bear market!
Moving forward in 2023 we’ll continue to build our portfolio of prospects and want to add more VCs and Family Offices to our network. We have over 60 at this time and want to increase that to over 100 by the end of Q1 2023. To do this we will be continuing our BD efforts online and in person, in 2023 we are planning to attend a number of events including Pocket Gamer Connect, Consensus, Mainnet, Permissionless and Token 2049 to name a few. To assist both our VC network and projects, from now we plan to start regular communications around our deal flow and who is looking to raise capital. Please drop us an email or contact us via social media if you would like to be added to our VC list.
To kick that process off we’ve added some of our portfolio projects here. If you see something interesting please do ask for an intro, we’re keen to help develop relationships and add value in the space.
Happy Holidays to all and have a great start to 2023! It can’t be any worse than 2022, can it?…
