Dragonfly is a crypto-native venture capital firm founded in 2018 and headquartered in the United States. The firm started as Dragonfly Capital Partners, originally co-founded by Alex Pack (former Andreessen Horowitz) and Feng Bo of Ceyuan Ventures, with an explicit thesis of bridging crypto capital flows between the US and Asia. Over the following years the partnership evolved: Alex Pack departed, and Haseeb Qureshi stepped in as Managing Partner, becoming the firm's most public face.
Dragonfly has raised three funds. Fund I closed at approximately $100 million in 2018, Fund II at $225 million in 2021, and Fund III at $650 million in 2022 – one of the largest crypto-dedicated funds raised that cycle. Total capital under management exceeds $1 billion. The firm invests across the full crypto stack: L1/L2 infrastructure, DeFi protocols, payments rails, and consumer applications, with seed through growth-stage tickets. Geographic focus is global, though the team operates primarily from the US with strong LP relationships in Asia.
The firm's investment style leans technical. Haseeb Qureshi and General Partner Tom Schmidt (formerly Coinbase and early Uniswap contributor) are known for publishing detailed research on protocol economics, mechanism design, and DeFi security. Partner Tarun Chitra, founder of risk modeling firm Gauntlet, joined to deepen the firm's quantitative capabilities. This focus on fundamentals has shaped a portfolio concentrated in protocols with real on-chain usage rather than purely speculative assets.
Notable investments
- Compound – early backer of the DeFi lending protocol that pioneered on-chain interest rate markets.
- dYdX – led or participated in multiple rounds of the decentralized perpetuals exchange.
- StarkWare – invested in the ZK-rollup developer behind StarkEx and StarkNet, now Starknet.
- Optimism – backed the OP Stack L2, now the foundation of the Superchain ecosystem.
- NEAR Protocol – seed investor in the sharded L1.
- Ondo Finance – backed the real-world asset tokenization platform as institutional DeFi gained traction.
- 1inch – participated in early rounds of the DEX aggregator.
- Magic Eden – invested in the NFT marketplace that expanded from Solana to multi-chain.
- Rhythmic – seed round of $4 million in February 2026, a payments infrastructure company, reflecting continued focus on crypto-native payment rails.
Team
- Haseeb Qureshi – Managing Partner. Former professional poker player, software engineer, and author. Worked at Earn.com (acquired by Coinbase) and Metastable Capital before joining Dragonfly. Prolific writer on crypto economics and protocol design at haseebq.com.
- Tom Schmidt – General Partner. Contributed to the early development of Uniswap and worked at Coinbase prior to Dragonfly.
- Tarun Chitra – Partner. Founder of Gauntlet, a quantitative risk platform for DeFi protocols, bringing deep modeling expertise to portfolio diligence.
Recent activity
In 2024 and into 2025, Dragonfly maintained an active deal pace against a backdrop of recovering token prices and renewed institutional interest in crypto infrastructure. The firm stayed vocal on X (formerly Twitter) and at conferences about concerns around protocol governance, extractable value (MEV), and the risks of over-financialized token design. The $4 million seed in Rhythmic (February 2026) signals ongoing conviction in payments infrastructure – consistent with the firm's view that payment settlement is one of the clearest near-term use cases for public blockchains.
Public information on Fund III deployment pace and specific LP composition is limited; Dragonfly has not made SEC filings with full portfolio disclosures beyond what surfaces through portfolio company announcements. The firm's official site and Crunchbase profile list the most up-to-date deal history. With Fund III capital still largely in the deployment window and crypto markets showing renewed activity in 2025–2026, Dragonfly is positioned as one of a handful of multi-hundred-million-dollar crypto-native funds with the research bandwidth to compete on technical diligence at the seed stage.
