While Bitcoin treads water to start 2026, sentiment for other niches in crypto has soured even more—especially DePIN, or decentralized physical infrastructure networks. Tokens for the decentralized cell phone service Helium and the decentralized mapping network Hivemapper, for example, are near all-time lows. Still, some investors remain bullish on the concept, including upstart venture firm Escape Velocity, which has raised $61.74 million for a second fund to back founders in DePIN and crypto more broadly.
The firm closed its newest round of capital in December, attracting marquee investors like the venture giant Marc Andreessen and prominent fintech investor Micky Malka of Ribbit Capital. The fund of funds Cendana put in $15 million, the biggest check in the fund, said Mahesh Ramakrishnan, cofounder of Escape Velocity.
“I think the nature of crypto and doing extremely-out-there investing is that there will be cycles of feeling extremely bearish and cycles of feeling extremely bullish,” said Ramakrishnan, as he reaffirmed his belief in decentralized physical infrastructure.
Double down on DePIN
Crypto’s essential value proposition is decentralization. Founders have spun up financial rails, currencies, and assets that no single party controls. Others have taken that ideal beyond digital networks to physical ones, dreaming up peer-to-peer services for Wi-Fi, cell phone plans, and even drones. To incentivize people to support these networks, DePIN startups usually pay supporters in cryptocurrency.
While the concept of DePIN has attracted plenty of attention, it has yet to produce a project that’s broken into the mainstream. Ramakrishnan, who’s been described as “the DePIN cheerleader,” believes it’s only a matter of time.
“A lot of what you’ve seen in the last three years are DePIN projects that have launched tokens before they have anything; they’re launching tokens on the basis of hype and on the basis of an idea,” he said.
Instead, Ramakrishnan and his cofounder Salvador Gala, who was named to Forbes’ 30 under 30 List in finance, believe that they can find decentralized infrastructure projects that go beyond the hype.
The pair met as interns at Goldman Sachs. Gala went on to become an investor at Ribbit Capital, the venture investor that’s backed fintech stalwarts like Robinhood, Revolut, and Coinbase. And Ramakrishnan left Goldman Sachs for the private equity giant Apollo Global Management.
In 2022, the two friends, who are both crypto enthusiasts, decided to launch their own venture fund. “The idea that you could use these cryptographic incentives, and almost tie people to these economic cults, felt like a very novel thing, where you could build businesses around communities,” said Ramakrishnan.
That year, even as crypto was tanking, the duo raised $20 million from top-tier crypto VCs, including the founders of Andreessen Horowitz, Multicoin, and Framework Ventures. They’ve since backed a suite of DePIN firms, like the solar energy startups Daylight and Glow.
While they haven’t distributed meaningful capital back to their limited partners—investors in the fund are committed for 10 years—Ramakrishnan and Gala have had enough traction to triple their first fund’s size in their second go-around.
“We felt like they had a real pole position to see some of the best founders and projects being built in the space,” said Graham Pingree, a partner at the fund of funds Cendana.
