Nigerian VC Firm, EchoVC launches $8M blockchain-focused seed fund

EchoVC, a Lagos-based early-stage VC firm focused on investing in underrepresented founders and underserved markets, has launched an $8 million seed fund called EchoVC Chain, which is focused on blockchain investments in Africa. The company, which has invested in almost 40 companies across various markets worldwide made its first blockchain investment in 2021.

The fund is focused on making investments in founders and startups that span EchoVC’s specific areas of interest, which include fintech infrastructure leveraging stablecoins to optimize payments, liquidity, and treasury, exploring the unbundling and delivery of crypto/fintech building blocks, and decentralized finance functionality.

EchoVC is also excited about the prospects of DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations), not just for their ability to scale autonomously but also to organize human networks. The fund plans to explore emerging blockchain aspects such as digital identity, privacy, decentralized infrastructure edge nodes, and agile supply chains, to a possible future intersection between AI/ML and DAOs.

EchoVC also expressed excitement about the advent of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) as the digital version of cash channelled through the banking system to remove friction in access to financial products, streamline cross-border payments, and enable programmable local money.