Paradigm: Investor Profile

The thesis

Paradigm is a frontier technology investment firm founded in June 2018 by Fred Ehrsam, co-founder of Coinbase, and Matt Huang, a former Sequoia Capital partner, it began as a crypto-focused investor and now describes itself as building and investing in crypto, AI, robotics and across new frontiers from the earliest stages. Its defining trait is that investing and research are one integrated team: the firm builds open-source systems, contributes to research, and helps founders reason from first principles — work meant to expand what builders can prove, deploy and scale.

Sectors and stages

Paradigm invests from the earliest stages of idea formation through maturity, in cryptoassets and in the companies building the crypto economy. Its research spans cryptography and markets to AI security and protocol design, expressed through open-source tools and protocol contributions. In 2023 the firm broadened its public positioning to "research-driven technology" including AI — while insisting it had not pivoted away from crypto — and its current work includes prediction-market tooling, AI safety research and EVM benchmarking.

Fund size

Paradigm manages $12.7 billion in assets under management as of April 2025. Its first capital came in October 2018 as a $750 million open-ended fund — 60 per cent in cryptocurrencies, 40 per cent in startup equity — backed by institutional investors including Harvard, Yale and Stanford. In November 2021 it raised $2.5 billion for Paradigm One, its first venture fund and at the time the largest crypto venture fund ever raised. The firm also co-led the $1.15 billion Citadel Securities investment alongside Sequoia in 2021.

Notable portfolio

Paradigm's crypto investments include Uniswap, Coinbase, Maker, BlockFi and Sky Mavis. Its history includes the industry's defining blowup: the firm wrote its $278 million investment in FTX down to zero after the exchange's November 2022 bankruptcy — a position it later disclosed it had entered with initial misgivings. By October 2020, 13 of the firm's 28 startup investments had already raised or circulated tokens at higher valuations, drawing comparisons with peers such as Andreessen Horowitz and Pantera Capital.

Partners

Matt Huang is the managing partner; Alana Palmedo, who joined four weeks after founding, is also a managing partner. Fred Ehrsam stepped down from his managing partner role in October 2023. The firm employs around 59 people, blending investors with engineers and researchers — recent research credits include Dan Robinson, Georgios Konstantopoulos, Storm Slivkoff and Justin Wang.

Programs run

Paradigm runs several distinctive programmes. The Paradigm Fellowship is a four-day retreat for young, technical builders across AI, robotics and beyond. Hyperion is a weekend gathering for leading AI researchers thinking about what comes next. And Project Kryptos made the firm the steward of the solution to Kryptos, the CIA sculpture cipher unsolved for 35 years — Paradigm bought artist Jim Sanborn's private archive at auction for $962,500 and launched a public capture-the-flag challenge around it.

Credits and perks

No standardised founder credits or perks programme is publicly documented. Paradigm's founder value is technical: hands-on help with mechanism design, smart-contract security and engineering, plus operational support on recruiting and regulatory strategy.