TL;DR
Katie Haun has raised $1 billion for two new Haun Ventures funds, expanding from crypto into AI agents and financial infrastructure. The thesis: AI agents will need regulated financial plumbing, and the firms that built stablecoin infrastructure are best positioned to build it. Her first fund delivered exits including Stripe’s $1.1 billion Bridge acquisition and Mastercard’s $1.8 billion BVNK deal, and the new fund’s largest bet so far is Erebor, Palmer Luckey’s $4.35 billion digital bank.
Katie Haun has raised $1 billion for two new venture funds at Haun Ventures, split evenly between early and later-stage vehicles to be deployed over the next two to three years. The capital will go into crypto and blockchain companies, which have been the firm’s focus since Haun left Andreessen Horowitz in 2022 to launch her own shop. But the more revealing shift is not in the fund size, which is smaller than the $1.5 billion she raised in her debut. It is in the thesis. Haun is expanding into AI agents and financial infrastructure, betting that the next generation of autonomous software will need financial plumbing before it needs better models, and that the firms best positioned to build that plumbing are the ones that already understand how regulated money moves.
The thesis
Haun draws a deliberate boundary. “We’re not pivoting to be an AI fund,” she told Bloomberg. “We want to do AI that is in our lane.” The lane is financial services. Haun Ventures is looking at startups developing AI agents and infrastructure that help consumers and businesses access financial products at any time, eliminating what Haun considers outdated constraints like deadlines for wiring money. The framing is specific: not general-purpose AI, not foundation models, not the application layer that has captivated the rest of Silicon Valley, but the intersection where autonomous software meets regulated finance.
The firm has already started deploying behind this thesis. Haun Ventures is one of the largest investors in Erebor, a digital bank founded by Anduril Industries founder Palmer Luckey and backed by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund. Erebor, which received FDIC deposit insurance approval in late 2025 and raised $350 million at a $4.35 billion valuation, is designed to serve technology companies working with digital assets, artificial intelligence, defence, and manufacturing. It is the kind of institution that did not exist two years ago: a federally regulated bank built from the ground up for the companies building AI agents, not the consumers using them.
The infrastructure for AI agents to operate within the financial system is being built in earnest. Stripe has launched a machine payments preview integrating stablecoin settlement for agent-to-agent transactions. Mastercard launched its Agent Pay programme. PayPal and Google announced a joint Agent Payments Protocol. Visa is developing tokenisation infrastructure for autonomous purchasing. The common thread is that every major payments company has concluded that AI agents will need their own financial rails, and that the companies building those rails will capture a layer of value that the AI labs themselves will not.
The track record
Haun’s credibility for this expansion rests on returns from her first fund. The headline exits are in stablecoins: Stripe acquired Bridge for $1.1 billion, a significant uptick from the $100 million valuation at which Haun Ventures invested. About a year later, Mastercard acquired BVNK for $1.8 billion, making it the largest stablecoin acquisition to date. Haun Ventures first invested in BVNK at a $678 million valuation. Both exits validated the same thesis: that stablecoin infrastructure would become essential financial plumbing, and that the acquirers would be the incumbent payments companies, not other crypto firms.
Not all bets worked. Haun Ventures invested in OpenSea in a round that valued the NFT marketplace at $13.3 billion. A top investor later marked the company down to $1.4 billion. But the firm also bought distressed crypto assets at discounts during the FTX-era downturn and sold them at peak prices in 2025, returning capital to limited partners. Accolade Partners founder Joelle Kayden, a limited partner in the fund, pointed to the staking strategy and token trading as key contributors to investor returns. The new fund is slightly smaller than the debut because the team expects less dramatic swings in liquid token prices, a sign that the crypto-native part of the strategy is maturing even as the AI-adjacent part is expanding.
The landscape
Haun is not the only crypto-native investor broadening scope. Paradigm, one of the largest crypto-focused venture firms, raised $1.5 billion in February for a new fund that will invest in AI and robotics alongside its core blockchain portfolio. Matt Huang, Paradigm’s co-founder, said “developments in AI are too interesting to ignore,” though the firm intends to focus on the intersection of AI and crypto rather than competing for general-purpose AI deals. Sequoia raised $7 billion for its biggest-ever late-stage fund, Thrive Capital raised $10 billion, and Andreessen Horowitz has raised $15 billion. In that context, Haun’s $1 billion is modest. But the fund is not competing for the same deals. It is competing for the deals that sit in the gap between pure AI funds and pure crypto funds, a category that barely existed two years ago and now has two of the most credible crypto investors in the world racing to define it.
Venture firms that made early bets across AI and alternative assets are delivering extraordinary returns, and the firms that survived the crypto winter with their reputations intact are now in a position to capture allocations from limited partners who want exposure to both sectors without doubling their manager count. Haun’s pitch to LPs is that Haun Ventures can be that single allocation: a firm that understands tokenised assets, stablecoin infrastructure, and regulatory risk, and can apply that understanding to the financial plumbing that AI agents will require.
The edge
Haun’s differentiator is Washington. Before venture capital, she spent a decade as a federal prosecutor at the Department of Justice, including serving as what she describes as the first digital currency coordinator at the US Attorney’s office in San Francisco. Her first task was prosecuting crypto-using criminals. A decade later, that network spans both coasts: she hosted a West Coast Digital Currency Summit in 2015 with guests from Peter Thiel’s Mithril Capital and the Securities and Exchange Commission. Today, Chuck Schumer has sat in her conference room, and so has the Senate banking chair.
“The East Coast and the West Coast, they need translation between them,” said Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, an investor in Haun’s funds. The venture landscape is shifting from software to regulated, capital-intensive sectors where government relationships matter as much as technical insight: defence, energy, financial infrastructure, and now the regulatory framework that will govern AI agents operating in financial markets. Haun’s argument is that the same regulatory expertise that helped her navigate crypto’s journey from prosecution target to federally chartered banking infrastructure will be equally valuable as AI agents begin executing financial transactions autonomously.
The question is whether the intersection Haun is targeting, AI agents that operate within regulated financial systems, will be large enough and distinct enough to justify a dedicated fund, or whether it will be absorbed into the broader AI investment thesis that every major venture firm is now pursuing. Small, focused venture firms can outperform generalists when they own a category that the larger funds underestimate. Haun is betting that AI-native financial infrastructure is that category, and that the firms that understand both the technology and the regulation will build it. A billion dollars is a substantial bet. The returns on the first fund suggest she knows where to place it.
