Prominent crypto venture capitalist Vineet Budki is leaving the Dubai-based fund he steered to success, to launch what he hopes will be a bigger venture.
Budki was the CEO and managing director at Cypher Capital. He told MONIIFY in an interview that his new VC firm, Sigma Capital, has already raised as much as $40 million from an undisclosed group of investors and is looking to reach its $100 million target by mid-year.
“The goal is to build a network in around 10 cities, become one among the top five VCs in crypto, drive startup founders to us rather than the other way around, and deliver strong returns on investments,” says Budki. Sigma will conduct operations from both Dubai and Singapore, he adds.
As CEO of Cypher, which launched in 2022, Budki oversaw the deployment of about $80 million in 130+ startups.
He’s particularly well-known for backing Web3 projects like Mysten Labs (Sui), Manta Network, Casper Labs, Web3Auth and others that have changed the way people transact and interact in that space. And Web3 will be the key focus at his new venture.
Read more: The Ripple effect: XRP is bucking crypto’s downward trend
Crypto bull
Needless to say, Budki is bullish on crypto.
He told MONIIFY back in October when Bitcoin was languishing around $50K, and then again in December, that he sees the OG crypto hitting all-time highs of between $150K and $200K after mid-2025.
It’s a prediction Budki repeated on Tuesday. But he’s also betting that altcoins, basically everything not BTC, will do particularly well and bring a new wave of investment into the sector.
“Crypto is not a magic coin game, it’s an ownership of the process and one has to keep a 4-8 year horizon,” he says.
But with industry experts predicting that AI is likely to swallow up a bigger chunk of the VC pie than crypto (read MONIIFY’s report on that here), why has Budki stuck with crypto for his new venture?
“Crypto and AI are complementary to each other, even though AI’s growth rate will be greater than crypto’s,” he says. “But given we haven’t seen crypto or AI’s greatness yet, there’s enough room for both.”
Talk about bullish. We’ll be watching what Sigma delivers.
Edited by Lin Noueihed. If you have any tips, ideas or feedback, please get in touch: talk-to-us@moniify.com
