VanEck Launches Avalanche-Focused Fund Next Month

VanEck is planning to launch the VanEck PurposeBuilt fund next month, which will focus specifically on Avalanche. The goal is to have a dedicated fund that can focus on projects building on Avalanche, and it’ll be managed by VanEck’s Digital Assets Alpha Fund.

Pranav Kanade, portfolio manager for the Alpha fund, explained the firm's decision to focus on Avalanche. He stated that increasingly, the best builders want to own the full stack with minimal value leakage, and Avalanche’s L1 architecture makes that possible. The Avalanche team has also backed this with strong business development efforts that are delivering results.

Kanade further elaborated that earlier-stage teams looking to test for product-market fit can launch on the C-Chain, which is competitive with the best high-throughput EVM chains. The Avalanche ecosystem offers solutions for builders across their entire lifecycle.

The team doesn’t plan to launch any other funds with another ecosystem at the moment. The fund will invest in liquid tokens and projects backed by venture capital, which could include a variety of sectors, including gaming, financial services, payments and AI.

It’ll aim to invest typically “around or after a Token Generation Event, with a fundamentals-first strategy focused on long-term outcomes.” Any unused capital will be deployed onchain through real-world asset products on Avalanche, which could include tokenized money markets to ensure liquidity is maintained.

Kanade explained that the Avalanche team “liked our investment strategy.” He added that the team brainstormed a structure that would work well for both sides. Today’s best founders in the token space often face a ‘discovery’ problem — it’s easy to get drowned out by the speculative noise around memecoins and vaporware.

VanEck wanted to support a more mature approach to capital allocation, and Avalanche shared that vision. With many of the strongest founders already building in Avalanche, this was a natural direction for the firm. The team isn’t confirming the size of the fund at this time.

Overall, the announcement is just yet another sign of the times, as there continues to be a trend of capital going towards builders who are focused on other opportunities outside of infrastructure.