Unit Ventures 2024 year in review
2024 Review, Performance Benchmarks and our 2025 Thesis
2024 was a big year for us, with 15 new deals spanning crypto, AI, semiconductors and longevity. Here is how well we did, and what we are looking at for 2025.
2024 Review
To help better assess how changes in our thesis affect performance, we are now tracking TVPI and IRR on a “fund vintage” basis, where each year is a new fund (this year was our 5th vintage: 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024).
We invested in a total of 15 deals in 2024, bringing our portfolio to 49 deals since 2020. We had 3 exits above 1x, 3 exits below 1x and 19 uprounds. Here is our performance overall and across vintages:
Regarding dealflow, we significantly ramped up our investment pace, while also reinvesting in some of our existing portfolio companies. Here are some of the new deals we did this year:
Blockchain
Fractal is a Bitcoin L2 that enables layering chains on top of each other, recursively scaling the main Bitcoin L1. Fractal was created by the Unisat team, who are behind the most popular BRC-20 and Ordinals wallet. Fractal Bitcoin is already live in mainnet.
Optimum is building a high-performance data availability layer for blockchain data. It uses error coding to enabling storing and retrieving data 10x faster than current L1 and L2. Cofounded by Prof. Muriel Medard from MIT. Their round was heavily oversubscribed and led by 1kx.
DLP Labs is building a data monetization marketplace onchain, starting with automotive data. They are already live on the Vana network, and making revenue. The company was founded by Ryan Kuhel, who was previously at Meta where he oversaw large advertizing budgets.
Longevity
Deciduous Therapeutics is a longevity biotech platform focused on Senolytics. They discovered novel molecules that activate the immune system to to selectively clear senescent cells, thereby treating several age-related diseases. It was founded by serial biotech entrepreneur Robin Mansukhani.
BE Therapeutics is engineering replacement tissue to reverse damage to the central nervous system. In short, they are generating a precursor to embryonic tissue that is transplanted into your brain or spinal cord and can mature and integrate with the host. Their initial focus is on damaged neocortical tissue.
Zero Nutrition is Europe’s largest longevity community and platform. Modeled on Bryan Johnson’s open-source model called “Blueprint,” Zero Club has built a community of enthusiasts and experts, developed products (supplements, olive oil) and launched a blood testing platform for users to measure and track critical biomarkers for longevity.
Artificial Intelligence
Akhetonics is building the first all-optical, high-performance processor. Their photonic chip has AI execution and bandwidth that is orders of magnitude better than Nvidia’s H200, plus it’s significantly more energy efficient and much cheaper to produce. We wrote a more in-depth piece on the deal here.
Parable is building the P&L for your employees’ time. Their enterprise platform passively ingests data across the workplace tech stack, sorts, structures and enriches it to build a command center for resource management within the executive team.
Sentient is aligning AI innovations toward a community-built open AGI. They are building platforms and protocols to enable open-source AI developers to (1) monetize their models, data, and other innovations, (2) collaborate with each other to collectively build powerful AIs, and (3) be significant stakeholders in a new Open AGI economy.
Network States
Vitalia is a startup society based in Roatan, Honduras. They benefit from a special economic zone that enables them to accelerate R&D in biotech, longevity and crypto. They attract founders from around the world to live and work in their burgeoning startup nation.
Praxis is the world’s first Network State: a global online community with a national consciousness, developing a shared way of life, governing institutions, and crowdfunding a physical city.
2025 Investment Thesis
The stage is set for a thrilling 2025. Crypto is gaining institutional adoption and all signs points towards regulatory clarity in the US (read: bull run). A decentralizing force in the market is creating room for powerful, vertically integrated hardware-software companies to emerge. And though longevity/biotech is starting to trickle into the mainstream there are still arbitrage plays on the horizon. By and large, we will stick to our “script” categorically, but there are some modifications to how we plan to deploy capital in each.
Blockchain
The ground is shifting beneath our feet in the crypto industry. Bitcoin surpassed $100K for the first time in history, traditional enterprises are converting reserve cash on their balance sheet to Bitcoin, a favorable US regulatory environment is preparing their transition and a decade plus of infrastructure creation is poised to give way to a rich application ecosystem. These are all important macro tailwinds, but the ultimate point is paramount.
Crypto is at an inflection point, much like the Telecom industry of the 90s. Flush with infrastructure, the natural progression (and value creation) will come from the application layer built on top. As infrastructure costs and scaling issues trend down, demand for new use-cases and delightful user experiences will trend up. Coupled with institutional adoption and soaring confidence in the sector, we expect the next cycle to produce some of the very first “killer apps” in the space. As a result, we’re shifting our focus from infrastructure to the app layer in 2025.
We expect smartphone companies to start natively integrating crypto wallets, payment providers such as Stripe, VISA and others offering off-the-shelf crypto payment solutions, or big cloud providers offering tools for developers to integrate crypto into their apps. Finance will also have a big part to play, by tokenizing all kinds of financial assets and making crypto finance a big part of traditional finance.
Many of these new applications will require confidentiality, something blockchains don’t natively offer. This is where Rand’s company Zama comes in: it enables building confidential applications on any blockchain such as Ethereum or Solana, using a new technology called Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE). Zama will be making some major announcements soon, so stay tuned!
Network States
We are also excited by the idea of Network States (as evidenced by our investments in Vitalia and Praxis). There’s a real opportunity to transform the way we organize, cooperate and govern in a decentralized crypto-native manner. Both founders and legacy institutions will consider ways to rebuild civic infrastructure and rewrite the modern social contract.
We also believe FHE is a key building block for these movements to ensure confidentiality and privacy while they run their entire “country” onchain. The first decentralized political superpower is likely already born.
Vertical Integrators
Vertical Integrators are companies building vertically integrated hardware-software solutions. Some examples include Tesla (car + self-driving AI), Apple (iPhone + iOS), Space X (rocket + control software), or even Zama (FHE + ASIC). We believe this trend will extend to many more industries looking to improve performance dramatically while creating a defensible moat.
One industry in particular that will benefit from this is healthcare, where building new machines coupled with special-purpose AI software will likely propel medicine into a new era. One of our portfolio companies, Chipiron, is a great example: re-thinking the MRI machine thanks to new physics, tackling a problem incumbents won’t (or simply can’t) in order to redefine the industry and own the entire stack.
We want to see more founders pursuing these ambitious goals in energy, space, hardware and more.
Longevity
We’ve long said that longevity was just a short detour from mainstream medicine, designed to push the boundaries of innovation and re-make our approach to personalized, advanced healthcare. A majority of the best teams out there have been funded and are awaiting clinical trial results.
Fortunately, these pioneering scientists have made meaningful strides in their field; that said, much of the traditional VC industry is struggling to understand the space and how to invest. As a result, we see an opportunity to invest at Seed valuation bridges into companies doing Phase 1 trials that would otherwise be raising a Series A. We expect this to massively reverse and go exponential in 2027 once the first results are out. The window of opportunity is now.
If you would like to share dealflow or invest together, drop us a message! In the meantime, have a happy new year every one, and see you in 2025!
Rand & Kyle