Adam Torres and Vineet Budki discuss FII PRIORITY.
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Show Notes:
Listen to FII PRIORITY coverage. In this episode, Adam Torres and Vineet Budki, Partner & CEO at Sigma Capital, explore Web3 and FII PRIORITY.
About Vineet Budki
Vineet Budki is CEO and Managing Partner of Sigma Capital and has been a known face in the Web3 Venture Investment Space. Prior to Sigma, he headed Cypher Capital, one of the Biggest Web3 Fund’s Globally with 300+ Investments across 2 funds and having half a billion in AUM.
Vineet has been named in the Top 100 Indians in the Middle East multiple times and was recognized in the Top 10 Crypto Personalities Globally in 2024 by Arabian Business.
Vineet’s investments include Mysten Labs (Sui), Berachain, Gunzilla, Manta Network, My Pet Hooligan among many others that are helping evolve the way people interact and do transactions on the blockchain.
About Sigma Capital
Sigma Capital is an investment firm specializing in blockchain technologies that are positioned to revolutionize industries. With a strong portfolio and a history of delivering exceptional returns, Sigma Capital goes beyond traditional investing by actively supporting the growth and success of the Web3 ecosystem.
The firm offers comprehensive ecosystem support, leveraging a global network of industry leaders to provide strategic guidance and opportunities. Sigma Capital is recognized not only for its proven track record but also for its commitment to partnering with innovators who are shaping the future of decentralized technology.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you’d like to apply to be a guest in the show, just head on over to mission matters.com and click on Be Our Guest to Apply. All right, so today my guest is Vineet Budki, and he is. The A partner and CEO at Sigma Capital.
And I’m proud to say that this is part of our FII summit Priority Summit coverage that we’ve been doing, I’ve been doing this entire series and I’ve been interviewing people that either attended or were part of the conference and the summit both in Riyadh, Miami and there’s just so much going on that I wanna bring this to our audience.
So first thing, first, Vineet, welcome to the show. Hi, Adam. Good to be over here at the show and great talking to you. Okay, so first thing, first FII Priority Miami. I attended that, that was my first FI event. And I was hooked, like the people I met, the things I was able to do, the contacts, and really just the coverage and the interviews we’ve been doing.
Now, , I’m probably, you know, 20 interviews in for the conference and I think we’re gonna do north of 50 for this particular edition, which was in Miami. Correct me if I’m wrong, Venee, you were at the Miami one, right? I would, I was at the Miami one and I was at the Saudi one as well. The F summit, it’s interesting for me because I’ve been doing two funds, which were more like a single LP funds in the past.
Mm-hmm. And the idea of this new one came from FYI, Saudi, you know, when I went there and saw the amount of track five that’s floating around looking at equity funds and no one talking about Web3 and crypto. Mm-hmm. It started from there. So going to Miami was definitely part of the plan. Mm-hmm. With Sigma Capital.
So I do wanna circle back to Sigma Capital and the work you’re doing there, and also just get into Web3 as well in general. But before we do that what keeps you coming back to, you went to the one in Riyad, you went to the one in Miami. What keeps you coming back to the FII events?
See, for me, I come from the Web3 space, which is, you know, that crypto growth space, people have been investing in tokens. it’s a sort of a economy where you have. 500 odd million people having wallets and keeping on investing. When I attended FIS Saudi, I saw that, you know, a lot of traditional, that means, you know, a lot of Saudi entities, Saudi investments funds exist who don’t have exposure to Web3.
And for me, coming back to this place was meeting newer people who we can inform and educate to come back into the web space. So it’s, for me, FIA is more of a. Bridge of traditional capital into crypto capital because crypto hasn’t started yet. And you know, 10 years later you know, you saw the ETFs coming, et TF can be considered mm-hmm.
As a big way of institutional capital. But the family offices are still missing. The Jadas and the bels of Saudi are still missing in this game. So, mm-hmm. For me, coming there is to meet new people keep them informed in the next three, four years. All of them will be in bat three and I should be the foreigner in the space for them.
Man, I love it. let’s go further into Sigma Capital. So tell us about the firm and Exact, and, and maybe a little bit about the thesis around forming it. So Sigma Capital is my third fund. My, my last two funds were single LP fund. The same guy gave me a 10 million and a hundred million dollars to invest.
I’ve done mm-hmm. 300 plus investments in the web. Three Space Sigma Capital is my own fund regulated LPGP fund out of. Cayman investing in web startups. So, you know, when you invest in an equity of a company like a CY, you invest in future revenue ownership of a company. But mm-hmm When you invest in a token, you’re investing in process ownership.
I invest in tokens of multiple companies. I’ve done sui Misin labs. If this was done by ex pair of engineering for Facebook, I’ve done, say I’ve done peak network, like I’ve done 300 plus of these startups. Wow. That’s what I’m planning to do in this one. Invest in 120 plus venture deals across the.
Web3 space. Mm-hmm. Do a few liquid deals as well. Liquid deals basically means tokens that are there in the top a hundred in the coin market cap, and basically investing across foundations and early investors in them. So same thing. Venture capital investing. Just like equity, I’m focused towards tokens.
What are you looking for in, in the company or the tokens that you’re, you’re looking to acquire? What, what are you looking for? Again, when it comes to venture investing, technically it’s the same thing. You know, you look at what the founder has capability and capacity of a founder. Mm-hmm. And when you look at someone who was head of engineering for Facebook, for example, like even Chang from su, that he has built scalable projects.
He understands what the business model is. So first definitely is looking at the founder’s capability and capacity. You know, he hasn’t built a cycle and wants to go to a moon, build a rocket to go to Moon, doesn’t happen. So, mm-hmm. One is that part. The second part is what is he trying to build, you know, in.
It’s all about I want to plant a tree and raise money. That’s not what building rail sustainable models is. Is the building something that is going to get lending, borrowing to Africa, for example? Is the building a stable coin with a different perspective? Not a us like US DT and USDC already own majority of this play is the building a game that really has something great about it and will get users engaged.
To have their digital assets in game assets being transferred from one place to another. So I look at the founders, I look at what they’re trying to do. I definitely look at who are the investors on board, you know, to build a AAA game, you need a lot of money. Yeah. 50, $60 million or so. Mm-hmm. If he hasn’t been able to raise $2 million, unfortunately, something that doesn’t have a lot of.
Space. Yeah. So I look at those four or five parameters and then definitely love to meet the founders and understand their vision, so mm-hmm. Very similar to how you invest in e equity in an early stage equity of a company. And that’s what I look at. And and that’s in nutshell what I do.
Hmm. let’s take it maybe from the macro level a little bit and specifically the US policy shift and just the regulatory environment. What does that mean for digital assets, like from your vantage point? So for me, you know, there are two, three critical parameters that have been kicked on with Trump coming on board.
One is he’s become procr, you know, he’s been talking positive about crypto. That’s a one step ahead for us. Trump opens up the crypto for the whole world. So adoption comes and e again, adoption had already come with ETFs coming in, people putting money in Bitcoin, ETFs. Mm-hmm. But there also has been a issue that, you know, once Trump announced the crypto adoption, he launched a couple of mean coins.
Mm-hmm. I mean, coins are nothing but the Wolf of Fall Street penny stocks, which technically have no end or front, they’re just building on hype. So. I think from the regulatory perspective, it’s been a very positive impact because people nowadays are recognizing it as a asset class, but some of these haphazard moves of, you know, announcing a Trump coin or announcing a millennia coin, but having some of these tokens in the proposed crypto reserve, which means something like a cardan or something like a ripple where the token has no use case.
You know, Carano Ethereum has 60, 70% of the smart contracts. Ana has, Carano doesn’t So point is it’s been good. As well as that. And I think it gives momentum through the whole journey. So people now don’t look at crypto two as an asset plus in a suspicious manner. They look at it more positively.
Hmm. Let’s get just, slightly more niche here, Veit. I’m curious on your end, like within Web3, any specific trends, whether it’s in technology companies, I mean, wherever you wanna take that question. Any particular trends within Web3 that you’re following or, or what excites you? So, you know, when I look at Web3 over a general perspective, all the way from 2017 to now, I, this is how I break it.
It’s a very crude form of breaking it, but 2017 it was all about, you know, someone planting a tree in Africa and raising $5 million. Mm-hmm. No logic or no Orion just catching in on the hire. Mm-hmm. 2021 was all about building rail use cases. You know, you had Arve, which built the first bank online in today it has $28 billion.
Of capital deployed over there. So it’s, you know, the use cases came up, the games came up. It said that we will let people participate in building these games up. Identity came up, so these cycle two was all about building real use cases. And the third use case is all about building adoption and getting users on board.
So. The key trends that I see over here, which excites me, is how will we get the next billion users in there today? We have 500 million users. How do we get the next user base? So those users would come from things like a stable coin in Africa and Zimbabwe. This amazing inflation in Lebanon, you cannot take money out of your bank in Argent.
Another PSO has depreciated 95% of the time, so mm-hmm. When a thing like USDT or USDT goes there, which is a stable back dollar point, it brings value to them. Mm-hmm. Second is, you know, lending, borrowing is important. Something like awe, where. People can deploy their capital and earn a stable yield of 6% is an amazing use case, which we’ll get people on.
But games are mm-hmm an amazing way of getting people on board. Identity is one of the big cases, you know, in the. In this world of ai, I am not sure whether Adam is on the other side. And Sam Altman who built chat, GPT came, understood that idea and built a coin known as World coin, which basically takes your biometric mm-hmm.
Makes it into a hash rate. And the hash rate signs into this podcast verifying that it’s, we need. So identity is one key place. So these five, six segments that see to it, that more users come on board is what excites me in the coming future. Hmm. Now circling back to the, fund.
So Sigma Capital, is this open, is this a closed fund? So meaning the investors are set, or is it still possible for people to participate? Like, like, talk to me a little bit about that. So the fund was announced around two and a half months back. Mm-hmm. And it’s gotten soft commit of around $50 million already.
Initial closes expected. The first close is supposed to be a hundred million dollars fund. Mm-hmm. We are still meeting people. I’m doing a lot of road shows across Miami, across p Rico, you know, some of our investors and advisors are helping us do that doing something in LA as well. So yes, we are actively raising, we are looking to reach out to funder funds, h and i.
People who want to get into crypto, but want to understand more. You know, we are not a broker. We are not hairs who buys and sells. Like everyone has this whole mindset that, oh, these guys are buying and selling tokens on Binance. No, we do not do that. We are a venture capital fund in this space. You know, we invest in.
Companies much earlier than they when they would get listed, so mm-hmm. Yes. It’s a, a fund, which is open ongoing. Hopefully our first close is on June 31st, and the large close in December should be there at a hundred million dollars by then. Yeah. in the investments themselves. I’m curious, data’s deal flow work for you?
Like prospecting new deals, even just getting the deal flow. Mm-hmm. Okay. So I have done close to 300 plus investments so far in this space, and, you know, mm-hmm. That’s an offline. So you’re the guy, you’re getting stuff, you’re getting stuff. I mean, like the deals come across your desk daily, so, so deals come a lot and maybe not all are good.
I know you’re sifting. It’s about sifting. So I’m not saying the good ones come across your desk daily. I’m just saying. Luckily what I did was I, in the last four years, I built a great founder and an investor network. Mm. So I, you know, I don’t mostly invest in, you know, walking on the road. Someone comes and pitches to me is not how I do, I’m not that early an investor.
Yeah. Yeah. I would invest if a project would come out of an accelerator, an incubator, or throw a fellow VC as a co-investor. So that’s how my deal flow come. You know, a founder who has done amazing, refers me to another founder and I. Try to figure out whether there’s, like I have invested in a token.
We just launched on Binance, for example. It was known as Kernel dao. He just launched at a $500 million valuation. Now the head of business development for Kernel DAO, who took it from $60 million to $700 million of TVL just announced an AI startup. So, you know, it came from the network and that’s how I build on my leads.
Mm-hmm. I have to sort of invest in 120 investments. So we are looking at close to a thousand deals that we will look in the next three years. Yeah. And it all comes from founder networks and investor partners. Amazing. Vineet really good having you on the show today and learning more about Sigma Capital.
If somebody’s listening or watching this and they wanna follow up and connect with you or your team, how do they do that? I. So, you know, the best way to reach me is you can drop me a message on Twitter. I’m on vi my email’s simple. [email protected], the websites www.sigmavc.com. Mm-hmm. Someone who’s completely out of this ecosystem.
I am mostly in four to five events every month. Mm-hmm. Across the globe. So. I should be there in scar event. A salt event in Bermuda Should be in during milk and in the US in token 34 9. So you see me everywhere, but you have the social media where you can reach me out as well. Amazing. Well, Veit, appreciate you coming on the show.
Again, if everybody listening, just so you know, we’ll put the links in the show notes so that you can just click on the link and head right on over and speaking out to the audience. If this is your first time with Mission Matters and you haven’t done it yet hit that subscribe or follow button. This is a daily show.
Each and every day we’re bringing you new content, new ideas, and hopefully new inspiration to help you along the way on your journey as well. So again, hit. That subscribe or follow button and veit. , look forward to seeing you at Milken man. I’ll be there. So I’ve been covering that of that conference for years.
So I’ll see you at Milken. Sure, Adam. Look forward to meeting you during Milken.
