Game- and esports-focused venture capital fund Bitkraft Ventures has created a strategic partnership with Delphi Digital, a blockchain advisory firm dedicated to advancing the understanding and development of the growing digital asset market.
Earlier this year Bitkraft hired crypto and blockchain expert Piers Kicks to expand its capabilities. As Bitkraft continues to increase its focus on investments in companies that use blockchain technology as well as crypto assets and economics, the partnership with Delphi will help them find what they hope are the most exciting companies at the intersection of blockchain and gaming. They want to offer their collective expertise in gaming, esports, digital entertainment, crypto technology, and the token-based asset-class to portfolio companies.
Started in 2015, Bitkraft recently raised a new fund, and it has more than $400 million in assets under management with more than 50 investments in companies.
“The open infrastructure born out of decentralized technologies is reaching sufficient maturity to support new business models and content types at scale,” said Jens Hilgers, the founding partner at Bitkraft Ventures, in an email to GamesBeat. “We are excited to step into the ring as a catalytic force that embraces the inevitable change crypto will bring to gaming and beyond.”
He said that Delphi has a lot of knowledge and experience in the crypto space. This partnership will help Bitkraft identify entrepreneurs at the center of crypto and gaming. Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin have skyrocketed this year, and blockchain-based tech such as nonfungible tokens (NFTs) have also become a hot market. Blockchain is a secure and transparent ledger that is the foundations of NFTs, which are being used to uniquely identify digital items such as art, music, and game collectibles.
Anil Lulla, the cofounder of Delphi Digital, said in a statement that the combination of Bitkraft in gaming and Delphi in crypto will create a compelling value proposition for prospective portfolio companies and generate hope that blockchain games will penetrate the mainstream.
“Delphi has built a strong reputation as the leading institutional-grade research firm covering the digital asset market, in addition to having designed and optimized crypto-economic models for the largest projects across DeFi (Aave, Synthetix) and gaming (Axie Infinity),” said Hilgers. “Such a deep understanding of a new and fast-moving space is hard to come by, and we believe our unique combination of strong gaming and crypto expertise will deliver maximum impact for token-based investments in this sector.”
Additionally, Bitkraft Ventures will open its investment strategy to support investments in tokens as an asset class. Bitkraft has 15 employees while Delphi has 35.