Outlier Ventures Launches $30 million Diffusion program

Outlier Ventures, a  blockchain and Web 3.0 venture capital firm,  announced the launch of its ‘Diffusion Programme’. The program consists of a series of new initiatives aimed at supporting its portfolio of decentralised Web 3.0 companies in the wake of the ‘Crypto Winter’.  To achieve its vision for more rapidly diffusing Web 3.0 innovation the firm is making $30 million available over three years. Importantly, the investment will not be made in return for crypto tokens or equity, but instead is focused on supporting the diffusion and adoption of its portfolio’s Web 3.0 infrastructure. Instead of waiting for these technologies to become adopted organically in a typical ten year cycle, the firm is investing in the ecosystem needed to put these new Web 3.0 building blocks in the hands of software developers and corporations.

This will include creating a  specific program for engaging developers around OV’s vision of the ‘convergence stack’ of protocols including a vetted developer partner programme, building proof of concept programmes with large enterprises that hold the key to more mainstream adoption of crypto in addition to making OV’s incubation capabilities available to enterprise innovation teams directly, an ‘in-market’ accelerator program for start-ups providing the business support they need to grow real-world take-up and partnerships with academia to accelerate technical problem solving for its portfolio and the broader ‘convergence stack’ including direct sponsorship of students building the convergence stack. 

Jamie Burke, CEO at Outlier Ventures, commented: ‘Over the last five years we have consistently reinvested the large majority of our gains back in to developing our venture platform and tokenised projects. Now we’re taking the natural next step to help our portfolio of decentralised protocols realise their potential.” He continued: “When you consider a typical £100m VC fund only has a 2% management fee (or £2m) to play with you can see that what we’re committing here is way beyond normal.” 

Lawrence Lundy-Bryan, Head of Research at Outlier Ventures, commented: “Our Diffusion programme isn’t just focused on our portfolio’s technologies. We’ve recently mapped out the different layers of decentralised technologies we believe are necessary for Web 3.0 to challenge today’s broken Web – from applications to foundational infrastructure. After a period of frenzied experimentation the industry must now address how it triggers real interest and demand from a critical mass of actual users to benefit from tokenised mechanisms of incentives and disincentives.” He continued: “With Diffusion we’re tackling this challenge head on to facilitate a privacy-sensitive and more equitable version of the Web.”