The Nibiru Foundation has launched an investment arm, Nibiru Ventures, to support development on layer 1 blockchain Nibiru Chain.

The strategic venture arm was created “to overcome the challenges faced by ecosystem dapp founders and expand the scope of the services that Nibiru provides,” said Nibiru Chain COO Jonathan Chang, in a statement shared with Decrypt.

Along with funding, Nibiru Ventures will provide strategic guidance to ecosystem builders, assisting them with their go-to-market strategies. This includes advice on entity formation, pitching, fundraising, and technical support. Chang noted that Nibiru Ventures aims to reduce the initial risk for projects integrating with a new chain, ensuring alignment with Nibiru's ecosystem while not requiring exclusivity to the chain.

Nibiru Ventures’ strategic approach

Nibiru Ventures will look to invest in pre-seed and seed-stage rounds with a shorter time to market, prioritizing projects in the decentralized finance (DeFi) and real-world asset spaces. These include decentralized exchanges (DEXs), lending and derivatives projects, and vaults for structured products.

Nibiru co-founder Unique Divine said in a statement that these types of projects are “particularly promising” as a result of “patterns of historical adoption, parallels to successes in Web2, and a solid base of existing technology to build upon”.

The new investment arm will also focus on consumer-facing applications with real-world use cases, according to the co-founder, instead of “esoteric” behind-the-scenes infrastructure projects.

Launched on mainnet in March 2024, Nibiru’s smart contract ecosystem is built upon its layer-1 blockchain, which combines elements of both Wasm and Ethereum. As of June 2024, Nibiru Chain includes a high-speed Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) execution environment, set to launch on mainnet by the end of the year.

COO Jonathan Chang hopes that Nibiru Ventures can help teams reduce upfront risks associated with integrating their applications into Nibiru Chain, regardless of whether the app is targeting multi-chain expansion.

Nibiru Ventures has already made some notable investments, including one into decentralized lending platform LayerBank.The DeFi platform has roughly $675 million in total value locked (TVL) and has plans to provide cross-chain lending functionality by Q4 2024—becoming a liquidity hub across all EVM-compatible layer 2 and rollup chains.

Nibiru Ventures provides resources and active support to emerging Web3 applications. Projects can contact the team to apply for funding here.