Paradigm raises $1.2B fourth fund, expanding from crypto into all frontier tech

Paradigm raises $1.2B fourth fund, expanding from crypto into all frontier tech

Paradigm has closed a $1.2 billion fourth fund, broadening its mandate from crypto into what Alana Palmedo describes as "all frontier tech" — a shift the firm frames less as a strategic pivot and more as an acknowledgment that technology categories have stopped behaving like separate industries.

Paradigm launched in 2018 with crypto as its defining thesis. Palmedo argues that what made the firm work then — getting close enough to the technology to underwrite from first principles, with a team that includes computer scientists and physicists — is exactly what makes the expanded mandate credible now. The firm isn't hiring generalists; it's applying the same research-intensive approach to AI and other frontier areas.

“We raised 1,200,000,000 to go after the new opportunity set, Frontier. We got our start in crypto back in 2018. This is our fourth fund. We're gonna invest in everything from super early seed stage, even pre seed in some cases, all the way into growth markets. We also have a core flagship fund which is an open ended vehicle and so we invest into public markets too.”

Stage agnosticism

The new fund is fully stage agnostic, covering pre-seed through growth and into public markets. Paradigm's flagship vehicle is open-ended, meaning the firm can hold positions through and after IPOs. Palmedo says it's impossible to ignore early-stage founders, where the talent tends to be young and the upside is uncapped, but equally impossible to ignore the compounding power-law dynamics visible at the late stage. The answer, in her view, is to operate across the full spectrum rather than pick one lane.

Crypto infrastructure as a pricing signal

One thread Palmedo singles out is the emergence of 24/7 on-chain markets as a mechanism for pricing private assets before they go public. She credits Jeff Yawn at Hyperliquid and Jeff Lowe at trade.xyz with pulling off what crypto markets had long theorized. The Cerebras and SpaceX IPOs both saw active pre-IPO trading on-chain, and Palmedo says the on-chain prices tracked the eventual open surprisingly accurately. She expects institutional participation in these markets to grow, pointing to perpetuals as a particularly efficient entry point for large hedge funds.

Prediction markets are a related area she watches — less as a novelty and more as a precise instrument for institutional exposure to outcomes that were previously hard to hedge cleanly.

Investment thesis

The firm invests thematically into areas with a structural tailwind from AGI. Individual partners surface conviction through organic research sprints, often sparked by a specific founder rather than a top-down category mandate. Portfolio companies mentioned include True Anomaly and Zipline.