CoinFund

About

CoinFund is a crypto-native investment firm and registered investment adviser founded in 2015 by Jake Brukhman and Alex Felix ¹². The firm is headquartered in Brooklyn, New York ³. CoinFund describes itself as “one of the world’s most experienced cryptonative investment firms,” investing across seed, venture, and liquid stages in the blockchain ecosystem ¹.

Brukhman, who holds degrees in mathematics and computer science, previously worked at Highbridge Capital and Amazon before founding CoinFund ⁴. Alex Felix spent 10 years across research, investing, and structuring, including arranging buyouts at American Capital, with prior roles at BofA Merrill Lynch, RBS, and Guggenheim Partners ⁵. Felix has personally and professionally invested in over 100 blockchain-focused companies since 2013, including seed rounds of Ethereum and Blockdaemon ⁵.

The firm manages approximately $1 billion in assets under management across six investment vehicles with over 100 portfolio investments ³⁶. CoinFund’s fund progression includes early liquid and venture funds, a $83 million Seed III fund closed in March 2021 ⁷, a $300 million Ventures I fund announced in August 2022 ⁸, and a $158 million Seed IV fund closed in July 2023 that exceeded its initial $125 million target ⁹. Institutional investors including pensions, endowments, and family offices have supplied significant portions of CoinFund’s capital, with notable limited partners including Teacher Retirement System of Texas, Adams Street Partners, StepStone Group, Accolade Partners, and Theta Capital Management ⁸⁹.

In September 2021, CoinFund brought on David Pakman, previously a partner at Venrock for 13 years, as Managing Partner and Head of Venture Investments ¹⁰. Pakman had led the Series A of Dollar Shave Club (sold to Unilever for $1 billion) and personally invested in Coinbase prior to its IPO ¹⁰. Chris Perkins, a former global co-head of futures, clearing, and FXPB at Citi and Iraq war veteran who served nine years in the U.S. Marine Corps, joined as Managing Partner and President ¹¹. Seth Ginns, who invested in public growth equities over 18 years at Jennison Associates and was an early angel investor in Coinbase (2012) and participant in the Ethereum ICO (2014), leads liquid investments ¹². The firm has grown to approximately 30 team members globally ⁴⁶.

Stated Thesis

CoinFund publicly states its mission as championing “the leaders of the new internet” through “pioneering investment strategies in blockchain” ¹. The firm says it strategically invests in “the decentralized stack and key financial infrastructure” ³.

For the Seed IV fund, CoinFund described its areas of expertise as including “ZK/ML/AI; DeFi; Layer 2s; consumer services, gaming, NFTs and DAOs; infrastructure including nodes, security, analytics, middleware, interoperability and scalability, and emerging markets” ⁹. The firm has publicly emphasized a technology-driven thesis for decentralized AI, stating it will “advance the field of AI research and enable the development of artificial intelligence as a public good on open, decentralized networks” ¹³.

David Pakman has stated publicly: “The blockchain investment landscape is expanding: by geography, with more fruitful sub-sectors…leading to more users onchain” ⁶. Alex Felix has described the industry’s maturation as representing “one of the most compelling mega-trends of our time” ⁶.

CoinFund’s stated investment criteria emphasize three factors: established track records, responsible token management practices, and known (non-anonymous) founders ¹⁴. Brukhman has noted that 90% of the crypto projects CoinFund backs include governance measures to protect investors and restrict token distribution over several years ¹⁴.

Inferred Thesis

Based on 30 verified investments with sourced data, CoinFund’s actual portfolio reveals a firm that is heavily concentrated in blockchain infrastructure and DeFi, with a growing allocation to decentralized AI.

Sector breakdown (based on 30 verified investments): blockchain infrastructure and L1/L2 protocols account for approximately 10 of 30 investments (33%), including Solana, Polkadot, Flow, Monad, Moonbeam, and Blockdaemon. DeFi represents approximately 8 of 30 (27%), including Ondo Finance, ether.fi, Veda, Balancer, and LI.FI. NFTs and consumer applications account for approximately 5 of 30 (17%), including Rarible, Dapper Labs, Decentraland, and Gunzilla Games. Decentralized AI and compute represent approximately 4 of 30 (13%), including Prime Intellect, Pluralis, Recall Network, and Giza. Data and security represent approximately 3 of 30 (10%), including The Graph, Irys, and Cloudburst Technologies.

Stage distribution: CoinFund leads or co-leads primarily at seed and Series A stages. Check sizes range from $500K to $15M, with a sweet spot around $6-10M for Ventures I investments ⁸³. The firm also maintains significant liquid token positions through its liquid strategies led by Seth Ginns ¹².

Geographic concentration: The portfolio is heavily weighted toward US-based and globally distributed crypto-native teams, consistent with the firm’s Brooklyn, New York base.

Co-investor patterns: CoinFund frequently co-invests with other crypto-native firms including Multicoin Capital, Coinbase Ventures, and Distributed Global. The Ventures I fund LPs include traditional institutional allocators rather than crypto-native funds ⁸.

Founder profile patterns: The firm strongly favors founders with deep technical backgrounds in cryptography, distributed systems, and protocol design. CoinFund explicitly avoids anonymous founders ¹⁴. Several portfolio companies were founded by ex-employees of major institutions (Dakota founded by Coinbase/Square alumni, Ondo Finance by Goldman Sachs alumni).

Notable observation: CoinFund’s stated thesis is broad, but its actual deployment shows concentrated bets on infrastructure layers (L1s, cross-chain, data) and DeFi primitives (restaking, stablecoins, vaults) over consumer-facing applications. The growing AI allocation (13% of verified portfolio) represents a deliberate expansion of thesis beyond pure crypto into the intersection of decentralized compute and AI, a trend accelerating in 2024-2025. The firm’s liquid strategy, run separately from venture, provides a differentiated approach rare among crypto-native VCs.

Portfolio

This table represents approximately 30 of 100+ known investments. The remaining portfolio includes additional liquid token positions and earlier-stage investments not individually verified through press sources. CoinFund’s DropsTab profile lists 174 total portfolio entries including liquid positions ¹⁵.

In Their Own Words

“Like the birth of the commercial internet and the explosion of mobile computing before it, crypto is as big a tech wave as one could hope for, affecting all aspects of technology, restructuring the architecture below applications, and re-arranging the value chain of every market it touches. Structurally, crypto offers solutions to many of the challenges we see in today’s data monopolies, platform censorship, and in abusive fees charged by legacy middlemen.” — David Pakman, Managing Partner and Head of Venture Investments ¹⁰

“As a new participant just entering the space, it is absolutely much safer to stick with the big names. You’re not going to go wrong if you are investing in Bitcoin, investing in Ethereum.” — Jake Brukhman, CEO and Founder, Fortune Crypto Playbook podcast, August 2025 ¹⁴

“From our perspective, we’ve never had to invest in something that had a purely anonymous founder. We never found a project where, you know, it was so important to invest in it that we should have taken that risk on founder anonymity, and so we just haven’t done that.” — Jake Brukhman, CEO and Founder, Fortune Crypto Playbook podcast, August 2025 ¹⁴

“What we’re seeing in 2021 is early product-market fit with artists, creators, and collectors of digital non-fungible assets. We are extremely excited to support Rarible from the pre-seed round to the present round in building a platform for this new asset class for the modern digital world.” — Jake Brukhman, CEO and Founder, on the Rarible seed round, February 2021 ¹⁷

“ether.fi is the future of crypto asset management. As an on-chain DeFi solution, the protocol bridges the realm of what is technologically helpful to Ethereum’s protocol decentralization and an opportunity to maximize value for holders of ETH.” — Alex Felix, CIO and Co-Founder, on the ether.fi Series A, February 2024 ²⁰

“LI.FI is a universal layer that solves this fragmentation problem, allowing for true global cross-chain liquidity and asset interoperability.” — David Pakman, Managing Partner, on the LI.FI Series A extension, December 2025 ²⁷

“Veda solves an unmet and growing need in the DeFi ecosystem — as more wealth comes on chain, infrastructure for the on-chain equivalent of traditional ‘funds’ must exist, and Veda is the leader in providing these vaults.” — David Pakman, Managing Partner, on the Veda Series A, June 2025 ²⁶

“Irys represents the infrastructure layer for the AI economy. Where traditional approaches require piecing together multiple solutions, Irys has created unified infrastructure that makes data programmable. This is the AWS moment for onchain data.” — Einar Braathen, Partner, on the Irys Series A, August 2025 ²⁴

“Dakota [was] one of the first companies I had seen in the Web3 payment space that had a significant share of non-crypto customers.” — Alex Felix, CIO, on the Dakota Series A, July 2025 ²⁸

What Founders Say

“The best infrastructure is invisible — it just works. That’s what we’ve built with Veda.” — Sun Raghupathi, CEO of Veda, on the CoinFund-led Series A announcement, June 2025 ²⁶

“The increased funding showcases investor confidence in LI.FI’s growth and vision as our goal remains to make composability invisible and reliable.” — Philipp Zentner, CEO of LI.FI, on the CoinFund and Multicoin co-led Series A extension, December 2025 ²⁹

No additional independently sourced founder testimonials about the experience of working with CoinFund were found through dedicated searching. The quotes above are from funding announcement press releases and reflect founder statements made in the context of those announcements.

Sources