Uniswap Labs’ New Venture Arm To Fuel Its Web3 Ambitions

Uniswap Labs, the creator behind the leading decentralized exchange protocol Uniswap has unveiled its own venture division. Announcing via Twitter, the new wing plans to onboard millions of users into the web3 economy, with the goal of unlocking universal ownership & exchange for all.

As stated in the announcement blog, the venture unit plans to inject capital at different stages and levels of the web3 stack, ranging from infrastructure to developer tools and consumer-facing applications.

In addition to that, the team behind the fund claims that it will actively participate in on and off-chain governance when relevant, collaborating with the communities that have formed around the protocols they invested in to support their evolution.

However, the size of Uniswap Labs Ventures’ fund is not yet disclosed but has appointed Teo Leibowitz to lead the Ventures division alongside Chief Operating Officer, MC Lader.

Prior to launching its venture arm, Uniswap Labs has invested in 11 startups and projects such as Tenderly, MakerDAO, Aave, Compound Protocol, PartyDAO, LayerZero, and the Ethereum developer platform.

Venture capital [VC] firms focused on Web3 projects and crypto businesses are accumulating billions of dollars worth of assets under management as more capital is injected into the sector. The news comes after several venture giants like Sequoia Capital and Bain Capital Ventures, both launched their respective crypto-dedicated funds, this year.

That said, Uniswap has joined a growing list of crypto-focused entities that have formally deployed resources to investing in other companies in the space, including crypto exchange FTX and DeFi protocol Cake, which both recently launched venture funds.

Uniswap Ventures is a big deal for DeFi and Web3- Expert

DEX like Uniswap, which already has experience building in web3, can apply their expertise and lessons learned to other facets of the crypto market through their early-stage investments, this is what DeFi researcher Ryan Rasmussen of Bitwise Asset Management wrote in a tweet.

The leading decentralized exchange is the fifth-largest in DeFi by Total Value Locked [TVL], a metric that represents the value of crypto assets deposited on the protocol, according to blockchain data provider DeFi Pulse. It had $7.04 billion in TVL, around half that of the leading DeFi platform, Maker, as of April 11, DeFi Pulse shows.