Framework Ventures raises Fund IV to invest in crypto infrastructure embedded in hard tech industries

Framework Ventures has raised its fourth fund, pushing the San Francisco-based firm to roughly $2 billion in AUM. Co-founder Michael Anderson started the firm seven years ago with co-founder Vance Spencer after both left tech jobs — Anderson from Snapchat, Spencer from Netflix — moved into Anderson's parents' house, and launched with a $15 million first fund backed by a single institution. By Fund II, at $100 million, they had brought in multiple institutions. Fund IV counts Ivy League endowments and sovereign wealth funds among its LPs.

“We started Framework really with a thesis and a lot of people started with trading or a hedge fund thesis. Ours was actually the opposite in that we felt like nobody was going after the early seed stage of venture investing in the crypto web three space in 2019. What a lot of what we're seeing now is people who have domain expertise in different areas who are saying, help me do the crypto — whether it's energy, nuclear, AI, or hard infrastructure.”

Thesis shift

The original bet in 2019 was that no one was doing serious early-stage venture in crypto. That gap has closed. The new edge Anderson sees is domain experts from outside crypto — energy traders, hard infrastructure operators, defense and AI builders — who understand their industries and want help applying decentralized infrastructure to them. The pitch is that crypto is no longer a standalone asset class but something getting embedded in hard tech industries. A distributed decentralized utility built by a decade-long energy trader is the type of deal Framework is now chasing.

Portfolio consistency

The venture discipline hasn't changed. Framework holds digital assets in each fund and backs founders across cycles, including some who have moved away from crypto entirely. Anderson cites an investment in a company called Mecca, founded by entrepreneurs who previously sold a company to Coinbase and are now building a data platform for robotics AI — a relationship seeded through crypto that follows the founder rather than the sector.

On Michael Saylor

Anderson's read is measured. Mixing financial engineering with crypto has historically ended badly, and Strategy's multi-layer structure — convertibles, preferred, common — creates real fragility if any leg of the stool gives way. But he thinks the blow-up narratives are overblown, credits Saylor with surrounding himself with capable people, and expects him to be proven right eventually. His caveat: it could take years, and the current drawdown is exactly what every four-year crypto cycle looks like from the middle of it.