Paradigm was founded in June 2018 by Matt Huang, a former Sequoia Capital partner, and Fred Ehrsam, co-founder of Coinbase, at the bottom of a brutal crypto bear market when cryptocurrency prices had collapsed and most institutional capital had fled the space. That contrarian timing, backed by an initial $750 million from institutional investors including Harvard, Yale, and Stanford in an open-ended fund with no deadline to return capital, established Paradigm's identity as a genuinely research-driven, engineering-heavy investment firm - the team is, in its own words, 'as likely to ship code as to cut checks.' Under Matt Huang and Managing Partner Alana Palmedo, the firm has expanded well beyond its original crypto mandate into AI and robotics, closing a $1.2 billion Fund III in 2026 to back frontier bets including Zipline and True Anomaly, on top of an earlier $2.5 billion flagship crypto fund (2021, then the largest dedicated crypto fund ever raised) and an $850 million early-stage blockchain fund (2024). Paradigm now manages more than $12.7 billion in assets under management.
No traditional Paradigm-portfolio IPO exit - the firm's clearest proof points are Fund III bets Zipline (drone delivery, valued at $7.6 billion) and True Anomaly (space defense, valued at $2.2 billion), both still private and rapidly appreciating