Artichoke Capital

Our friends at Hemi Labs just announced their $15M seed fundraise, led by Breyer Capital, Binance Labs and Big Brain Holdings. Hemi is a modular blockchain network that brings programmability to Bitcoin by embedding a Bitcoin full node within an Ethereum virtual machine. We're excited to be part of the journey with cofounders Jeff Garzik and Matthew Roszak, who we've known for several years. Jeff was an early Bitcoin core developer, working with Satoshi Nakamoto from the earliest days of the development of Bitcoin. He's been a longtime advocate of open-source software development from his time at Red Hat working on the Linux kernel - the software he contributed lives in every Android phone and data center Linux installation today. Link to the full press release: https://lnkd.in/gepRJ6Qu Artichoke Capital David LEE Kuo Chuen 李国权

We raised $15M and couldn't be prouder of the team and honored to have started Prodia with Shawn Wilkinson & Monty Anderson. Excited to get closer to building an AI-powered future that is more accessible, democratic, and open. Reflecting on our journey, it feels like destiny. We've been experimenting with generative AI for years.  After the release of Stable Diffusion, we launched an app to simplify access and were blown away by the response. Over 100K users signed up in under 2 months! Think of the scene in Silicon Valley with GPUs on fire—that was our reality, with some hardware still running in our basement. Getting GPUs from traditional cloud providers was nearly impossible. Fortunately, I was working with two experts in distributed systems. We just launched our own distributed GPU cloud because we had to. From that point on, our mission became clear: to ensure a world with open and equal access to AI, a distributed compute system must exist. A future where you can contribute to the network or access the best models is the future we envision. Thank you to our amazing investors, would not be possible with you. Anirudh P. Patrick Dai Jeremy Voss Matthew Roszak Balaji S. Timothy Chen Jermaine Brown Allen Nance Curtis Cheng Erik Huddleston Amit Vasudev Lauren Feld Zachary Ginsburg Sajid Rahman Ryan Condron Xan Ditkoff Nicolas Pinto Thomas France Shawn Lim Salvador Gala Etiënne V. HashKey Group Leon Marshall Marlon Williams Jason Kam Richard Dai, CFA Kenzi Wang Nicky Montana Matthias Buschle Jason Choi Benson Y. And also all the folks I couldnt find on Linkedin :) Today, we are proud to call some of the largest image generators in the world our customers. With a recently launched low-latency API, we’ve achieved best-in-class generation times. Try it here: https://sdxl.lol/

I’m so excited to see Movement Labs finally announce their blockbuster $38 million Series A fundraise, led by Polychain Capital and other great investors from the web3 ecosystem. They're building a MoveVM layer 2 on top of Ethereum, inheriting the security and scaling (30k+ TPS) benefits of the Move language (originally developed by Meta/Facebook), and the liquidity and security of Ethereum L1. I was introduced to rushi manche and Cooper S. last year. Their enthusiasm and energy was infectious and we invested in their seed round. I’ve since spent a bit more time with them in person at conferences around the world and always leave each conversation more energized than before. Launching a new blockchain is hard (really) and requires a blend of technical genius with community building talent. The Movement Labs team has both in spades. They’ve done an amazing job so far building the brand, community, and striking partnerships across the crypto ecosystem. Happy that we at Artichoke Capital get to be a small part of their journey and I’m excited for what comes next. gmove. https://lnkd.in/gHJMSgng

Paradigm leads Series A $225 million round for Monad Labs. We are hiring.

Just coming off an amazing week at ETHDenver. Was happy to share the stage at the conference with friends and fellow investors where we talked about the web3 opportunity in Asia for founders building on this technology platform. Sharing highlights for our non-Asia friends: - 260 million people in Asia already own crypto assets. That's still only 6% penetration of the total population. - There is a deep bench of developer talent in Asia that can be harnessed as part of a global workforce in a borderless industry. Salaries are substantially lower than in high COL cities like NY and SF. Founders can stretch runways with a global team. - If you're building consumer products: Asian consumers are willing to experiment with new experiences. Early iterations of web3 gaming kicked off first in Asia before going viral around the world. Asia is already the most important market for web3 and will continue to be relevant. Of course, building a distributed team and community in this part of the world requires local expertise. Feel free to reach out to any of the investors on the panel who will be able to provide some insights and help to teams looking to build out their presence in the most important geography in the world! Artichoke Capital David LEE Kuo Chuen 李国权 Jacob Ko Nicole Zhang Cecilia Li

One week after launch, bitcoin ETFs have 2.5x the assets under management of silver ETFs in the US. Gold ETFs are still king (for now) with 3.3x the AUM of the bitcoin ETFs. Not bad for a man-made commodity with only a 15 year history. Artichoke Capital David LEE Kuo Chuen 李国权Eric Balchunas #bitcoin