Jun 8, 2022
BlueYard 3
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us…” — Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
“We are as gods and better get good at it,” — Stewart Brand (updated)
As we wrote in our v2 thesis, humanity is very likely in its most important century ever: i.e. this might very well be our best century ever, or quite possibly our last century. Through technology, we increasingly will have the potential to become a resilient super species that further contributes to the cosmos knowing itself, to create abundance for all, to move up on the Kardashev scale — while doing so in harmony with our planet.
However, potential only implies “having or showing the capacity to develop into something in the future” — and by no means should we take our technological and societal advances for certain. In fact, recent events have reminded us that great darkness exists within humanity. But darkness also provides contrast, and contrast helps to see things more clearly. So we now more clearly see our v2 thesis and mission as a firm within the backdrop of having to ensure that liberal and open societies remain well ahead in terms of any thinkable technological advances before any other competing societal / governance system acquires them. We believe that:
- Capitalism paired with democracy is the best system bar none; while appreciating that capitalism has significant market failures and mis-priced externalities (see point on climate below), while democracies are increasingly vulnerable and under attack from within
- We should be able to have an optimistic outlook on a growing humanity that has more energy at its disposal to advance civilization and the human experience; while acknowledging that on its current trajectory humanity might peak within the next decades and then potentially begin a phase of steady decline — magnified by our current creation and consumption patterns that will only further advance civilizational decline due to climate breakdown
- In order to live up to our cosmic level responsibility to help the universe understand itself, we should aim to upgrade humanity’s resilience and longevity by using new capabilities to author life to understand, augment, and engineer our biology to a new level; while understanding that unless we unlock evolution’s algorithms more rapidly we will remain woefully unprepared, e.g. for the next pandemic, to defeat cancer as the emperor of all maladies and to remove chemicals from the environment that are increasingly disrupting the body’s core systems
- We have to increase humanity’s computational capacity at an increasingly exponential pace to help us build and scale all of the technologies required for a thriving species that can live in harmony with the planet; appreciating that it will be a struggle to stay on the Moore’s Law curve
- We must understand that climate breakdown is not only about the planet or nature, it is very much about the survival of the human species itself; while acknowledging that too few people understand that resource and nutritional volatility will lead to unimaginable global scalable conflicts. Markets, wealth and growth are irrelevant in a future with no humans (having squandered our rare cosmic scale potential)
- Diversity and inclusion are not just a matter of fairness, but also about the ability to harness the full potential of humanity; while appreciating that much of humanity’s potential lies systematically idle as of today
It is within this context that we are today announcing that we have raised BlueYard 3, a $185m early stage fund (bringing our AuM to $500m). We have increased our fund size slightly from BY1/2 ($120m each), but remain committed to small early stage funds — however had to factor in that market dynamics require slightly more capital to continue our early lead investor strategy.
BlueYard has made 17 investments (e.g. from zK-SNARK hardware acceleration, RNA to protein manipulation, to programmable chemistry) over the last twelve months across BlueYard 2 and BlueYard Crypto 1 and will continue to be active through economic cycles with BlueYard 3 along our v2 thesis:
“BlueYard backs founders building the interconnected elements that can become the fabric of our future. A future where markets are open and decentralized, where we have solved our largest planetary challenges, where knowledge and data is liberated and humanity can live long and prosper.”
while allowing us to keep focusing on the technologies we think will have the highest impact as fabric layers for a positive future for humanity:
Web3: to create “open by default” and resilient infrastructure for free markets and self sovereignty
- Protocol Labs (next generation internet protocols)
- IPFS (distributed web protocol)
- Filecoin (safe and resilient storage network for humanity)
- OpenZeppelin / Forta (security for decentralized applications)
- Radicle (decentralized backbone for the world’s code base)
- Textile (interconnected tools for the decentralized web)
- AirTM (p2p financial liberty platform)
- Centrifuge (real world assets to DeFi)
- Violet (layer 2 for identity)
- [Stealth] (mitigating negative externalities of MEV)
- Housecat (broadening access to crypto and DeFI investing)
- Massa (L1 for both decentralization and scalability)
- Kiln (formerly Skillz) (staking as a service)
- Privy (user data and privacy layer for web3)
- [Stealth] (zK-SNARK hardware acceleration)
- Cryptio (crypto accounting)
- Syndicate (A decentralized investing protocol and social network)
- MetaPals (Making web3 more fun and accessible)
- DXOS (Decentralized application development and deployment platform)
Programmable biology: to enhance human resilience and mitigate planetary challenges
- Bit Bio (programmable stem-cells)
- Meatable (animal free economy)
- Positive (next-gen convenience food)
- Biofidelity (accurate and affordable cancer diagnostics)
- Rarebase (rare disease therapy breakthroughs)
- Origin.bio (bio based goods and materials)
- Clock Bio (novel anti-aging therapeutics)
- Zafrens (manipulating how RNA become proteins)
- [Stealth] (reinventing transgenes)
Breakthrough computation and engineering: to stay on (or exceed) Moore’s Law curve and to equip us with the tools and resources to support a growing humanity
- SEEQC (digital quantum computing )
- Marvel Fusion (laser-induced fusion)
- Dance (e-bike based clean urban transportation)
- VSParticle (nanoparticles R&D+ scaling)
- Corintis (enabler for high performance computing)
- FreedomFi (personalized 5G network operator)
- Spaero (enabling scientists to quickly automate experiments)
- Chemify (programmable chemistry)
- [Stealth] (distributed electronic defense)
Knowledge and data liberators: because information wants to be free
And if this all sounds interesting to you, why not join our team?
