Concentric, the London and Copenhagen based pan-European venture capital firm, has announced the launch of Timechain, a fund dedicated to equity investments in early-stage companies building on bitcoin. The fund is over 60% of the way to its $21m first close target.

Timechain will focus on pre-seed and seed investments of between $100k and $1m in companies building infrastructure solutions for bitcoin - the asset and the monetary protocol - including the lightning network, mining and energy and decentralised finance on bitcoin.

The fund will be headed up by Alexander Mann, Partner at Concentric, who has a track record of investing in successful startups in Europe and beyond, including BVNK and Superscript.

“We believe bitcoin presents the greatest asymmetric value creation opportunity in history because bitcoin is perfected money and money itself is the largest market on the planet. Venture capital funds have missed this fact and have instead created hype around blockchain technologies that are built on unsound foundations and have no genuine use-cases despite billions of dollars of investment” comments Mann.

“Our deep-seated conviction is that bitcoin is widely misunderstood and underappreciated, both as a monetary asset and a monetary protocol. With recent developments to the lightning network and exponential grassroots adoption, it is the perfect time to invest in scaling bitcoin infrastructure to rearchitect the monetary system and our economic system more broadly. For this reason, Timechain’s sole focus is on supporting bitcoin only companies focused on creating lasting value rather than selling worthless tokens to an unsuspecting public.”

Timechain has already made six investments:

A stake of $750,000 in Unmapped Digital Mining, an 100% off grid, renewable bitcoin miner
A $100,000 stake in Bolt.Observer, which is building essential tooling for companies running lightning network nodes
Fedi, a privacy and scaling solution looking to bring billions of people in the global south onto the bitcoin standard
Galoy, open-source bitcoin infrastructure for nation state and corporate adoption of the bitcoin standard
Noah, a bitcoin first neo-bank focused on emerging markets where individuals are most at need of an independent, censorship resistant money
A further investment to be announced