The venture capital firm Aglaé Ventures, backed by the LVMH group and Bernard Arnault, plans to invest €100 million in promising Web 3.0 and cryptocurrency projects. Although the information is still not widely publicized, this new fund could be the talk of the town in the days to come.
The Arnault Group invests heavily in Web3
Agache, formerly Groupe Arnault, will develop a fund dedicated to young projects evolving in cryptocurrencies to the tune of at least 100 million euros, according to an exclusive information from our colleagues at The Block.
The operation will be carried out via Aglaé Ventures, the venture capital company specializing in technology investments and backed by Bernard Arnault, CEO and managing director of the LVMH group.
According to several sources close to the company, the amount deployed will be between 100 and 110 million euros. Usually, the financial arm of the group invests in the range of 100,000 to 100 million euros.
For your information, Aglaé Ventures has in the past invested in multiple successful projects such as Netflix, Spotify, airbnb or Devialet. Last June, the company took its first step into cryptocurrencies by participating in a round of financing for the French company Flowdesk alongside Ledger, Coinbase and Sébastien Borget (The Sandbox).
Back in February, Bernard Arnault showed his skepticism about certain facets of Web3, saying that LVMH was “largely in the real world” and that the group was not interested in “selling virtual sneakers for 10 euros.” However, the group has already proven in the past that it is not indifferent to blockchain technology.
Aglaé Ventures, future leader of Web3?
Last May, we learned that Vanessa Grellet was joining Aglaé Ventures alongside Lazaro Gustave, a founding member of FlamingoDAO and also a former operations manager at the Aave liquidity protocol.
Vanessa Grellet, on the other hand, has extensive experience at ConsenSys, the parent company of the MetaMask portfolio, as well as at the investment fund specialized in crypto CoinFund.
Thus, she had already sniffed out the upcoming opportunities for the venture capital firm, as she was able to tell Blockworks at the time:
“This venture capital firm has been very successful in the Web2 space, but they’ve seen a lot coming in the Web3 space and wanted to hire a specialist to manage that part of their investments. We’ll both have a lot of operational experience to help the founders and take them from zero to one.”
Some of the sectors involved in these various investments will include centralized finance as well as decentralized finance (DeFi), but also Web 3.0 infrastructure, scalability solutions for networks and tools for creators.