Lightspeed Adds $7 Billion Across Four Funds, Creates ‘Crypto-Native’ Team

Lightspeed Venture Partners announced today that it’s closed the firm’s latest funding round, bringing in more than $7 billion across four funds that focus on early- and growth-stage companies.

The private equity firm also unveiled Lightspeed Faction, described as “an independent team dedicated to building on Lightspeed’s nine-year history of backing exceptional founders in blockchain infrastructure.” Sam Harrison and Banafsheh Fathieh will lead the new team.

“Blockchains have enabled new use cases that we believe will supplant notable legacy systems. Faction’s joint-venture with Lightspeed pairs a crypto-native team with the company-scaling experience of the Lightspeed platform,” they said in a joint statement.

The raise occurred amid a vicious bear market that’s seen several cryptocurrency firms lay off staff, get liquidated, or get bailed out. A separate report released Tuesday by business analytics firm CB Insights noted that the $108.5 billion raised among 7,651 venture deals in the second quarter of 2022 was down 23% from the first quarter and was “the biggest quarterly percentage drop in deals (and the second-largest drop in funding) in a decade.”