Polygon founder Sandeep Nailwal is launching a new project called Symbolic Capital, a venture capital (VC) fund that will focus on Web3 founders.
The VC has raised $50 million from investors including crypto exchanges, institutions, family offices, and other venture firms.
They are yet to share the names of their investors.
The venture capital was co-founded with Kenzi Wang, who is also the co-founder of Cere – a decentralized data cloud platform.
Both Nailwal and Wang are well versed with crypto and Web3 in Asia and have decided to come together to empower the next generation of Web3 builders on the Asian continent.
Symbolic plans to back companies building consumer-facing decentralized apps (dApps), with the goal to accelerate the development of Web3 apps which aligns with Polygon’s goals, according to Nailwal.
“My core mission is to bring mass adoption to Web3, and mass adoption is only going to happen via apps. It’s not like I’m going to build a blockchain, and people will come and use the blockchain, nobody uses a blockchain directly. They always use it via some app,” stated Nailwal.
Symbolic has already made some investments in Web3 gaming studio BlinkMoon, Polygon-based metaverse Planet Mojo, and esports platform Community Gaming.
The VC will focus more on emerging markets as the founders believe they are more pragmatic due to the circumstances they face when compared to their better-resourced counterparts in Silicon Valley.
Nailwal added that he took a similar approach when building Polygon, where he said he would test one new technology at a time until it has crossed a milestone before moving to the next idea.
“Many of them have the capability that they can build businesses which can eventually acquire users, but you need to help them to keep reinventing themselves and upping their bar so that once they have a proven model at a smaller scale, they keep growing at a much bigger scale,” says Nailwal.
Symbolic is focused are interested in startups that fall into the creator economy subsector such as fantasy sports companies.
“In Web3 fantasy, you can have NFTs and you can put those NFTs on rent when you are not playing so you can get some passive income, plus you can earn tokens on the platform and become and become part of the platform from a very early stage,” stated Nailwal.
Symbolic also has its internal data platform which was built to support their portfolio companies and bolster its diligence process. The platform will aggregate data such as GitHub contributions, Discord engagement, and token performance as well as employment and hiring trends, according to the firm.
