RockawayX Raises $125M Fund to Double Down on Solana

RockawayX, a crypto VC company with over $2 billion in assets under management, has just closed its second fund, raising $125 million.

Crypto VC firm RockawayX, which has more than $2 billion in assets under management, has just closed its second fund with $125 million.

The firm, which is known for its early backing of the Solana ecosystem, will use the new fund primarily to invest in early-stage web3 startups. Other areas of interest for the new RockawayX fund include DeFi, infrastructure protocols and networks powered by its own data centers, per the firm’s CEO, Victor Fischer.

“We’ve been focused on the Solana ecosystem since meeting Anatoly and Raj (Solana co-founders) at the 500 Startups incubator in San Francisco in early 2018,” Fischer said in a statement.

After that fateful meeting, RockawayX’s first fund, which raised $120 million, went on a spree of investing in the Solana ecosystem. In 2019, the firm backed the Solana Labs funding round and later invested in Kamino Finance, Squads, Switchboard, and multiple other Solana ecosystem projects.

“Rather than investing in more L1s, we focused on building applications on Solana and being the first users for our founders: from providing liquidity to running solvers and operating hardware services.”

While the company will invest a portion of the fund in DeFi projects across all chains and networks powered by its own RockawayX infrastructure, roughly 50-75% of the fund will be positioned in Solana-based projects, according to Samantha Bohbot, Partner and Chief Growth Officer at RockawayX.

“Where other projects may feel like research efforts, Solana operates as a company with a mission to develop the dominant blockchain solution and promote it to builders and institutions.”

RockawayX is an engineering-first investor. It runs validators out of its Prague-based data centers and builds protocol-ready hardware tools such as optimized GPUs.

Across its various divisions, RockawayX manages roughly $2 billion in assets according to Bohbot. In addition to venture investing, the firm actively provides liquidity across DeFi protocols and develops infrastructure in-house through its RockawayX Infrastructure unit. Its Labs division incubates early-stage Web3 projects and open-source tools.