Dubai's Venom Ventures Falls Short of $1 Billion Co-Funding Plans

Dubai's Venom Ventures, a crypto fund from Abu Dhabi, which had announced ambitious plans to invest nearly a billion dollars to support the industry, has remained notably silent. According to analysts at Block Research, after its first year of operation, Venom Ventures officially declared support for only two projects with a total investment of $25 million. Specifically, $20 million was invested in Nümi Metaverse, and an additional $5 million went to the first-layer blockchain project, Everscale.

"Venom Ventures, the crypto fund from Abu Dhabi, which announced ambitious plans to invest around a billion dollars in industry support, is surrounded by deafening silence," note Block Research experts.

At the fund's inception, it was expected that by the fourth quarter, the industry's total demand for venture financing of Web3 projects would exceed $2 billion. However, there is still no information on the Venom Ventures website regarding the consideration of funding new projects, and Block Research's transaction database does not record any new fund investments in startups since January 2023.

According to experts from Block Research, Venom Ventures' 2023 results demonstrate that market participants in digital assets are unable to capture the interest of venture investors with proposals for profitable and groundbreaking technological solutions. Furthermore, they believe that the hype surrounding Dubai as a Web3-friendly capital in the Middle East is nothing more than an illusion and a marketing ploy.

Co-founder and General Partner of Symbolic Capital, Kenzi Wang, also shares this view.

"The illusion is that startup founders coming to Dubai mistakenly believe that Middle Eastern investors are ready to invest in any projects that contain the words cryptocurrency and blockchain. On the contrary, investors in this region are extremely discerning. They have seen many naive entrepreneurs coming to this part of the world, thinking that money will fall from the sky," said Kenzi Wang.

Earlier, Bloomberg analysts reported that the interest of venture investors in financing new cryptocurrency startups in the first half of 2023 had dropped by more than 50%, reaching the lowest level in a year.