Casey Caruso, a former investment partner at crypto-focused venture capital firm Paradigm, raised $75 million to kickstart her new early-stage venture firm, Topology.
Caruso, who was listed in Forbes’ 30 under 30 list in 2022, said in a Dec. 12 X post that Topology will back founders who “put everything on the line to bend the arc of human progress.”
She worked at Paradigm between May 2021 and January 2023 and, before that, was the crypto specialist at Bessemer Venture Partners for more than two years.
Caruso has invested in everything from brain-computer interfaces and decentralized protocols to semiconductors and new cities over the last eight years.
Source: Casey Caruso
Caruso would have overseen many of Paradigm’s crypto investments, such as Coinbase, Fireblocks, Blast, Optimism, Uniswap, MakerDAO, Chainalysis, MoonPay, Gitcoin and Friend.tech.
Fortune reported that Cendana Capital and Accolade Partners led Topology’s $75 million raise, while limited partners included an undisclosed OpenAI founder, VC firm Andreessen Horowitz’s Marc Andreessen and Chris Dixon, one of the authors of GPT-4 and Bessemer’s managing partner Bob Goodman.
American celebrity and tech investor Paris Hilton contributed to Caruso’s new fund.
Caruso said Topology had been in stealth mode for seven months before launching on Dec. 12.
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Caruso, 31, said she started writing open-source software at 15 and mined crypto while still in school.
She used those profits to start angel investing — providing capital to startups often in exchange for ownership equity.
Casey Caruso featured in Forbes’ 30 under 30 list in 2022. Source: Casey Caruso/ LinkedIn
The serial investor also worked as an engineer at Google and had a brief stint studying neuroengineering at Harvard University before dropping out to work for Paradigm.
Crypto VC funding fell 17% quarter-on-quarter to $2.4 billion from 478 deals in Q3, Galaxy Research reported on Nov. 15.
Still, early-stage companies — Topology’s primary focus area — accounted for 85% of the funding.
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