VC firm Ethereal has avoided the spotlight for 5 years—now it’s telling its story

Good morning, Jeff John Roberts here. Happy Star Wars Day to those who celebrate. The venture capital crowd, in my experience, is not shy when it comes to telling their story to the media. So it was a surprise to encounter Ethereal Ventures, a firm that has been around since 2021, but has chosen to refrain from doing press until now. I recently spoke with Min Teo, who started the firm along with billionaire and Ethereum cofounder Joe Lubin, and here is what she had to say.

Teo, who cut her teeth in private equity and with the pension giant CPP, joined the Ethereum shop Consensys in 2018 to help run its investment arm. Like so much of crypto, Consensys had a chaotic reputation, but in time, Teo was able to bring order to its investing process, and helped spin out Ethereal in 2021.

Today, Ethereal holds just under $150 million across two funds, and has made pre-seed and seed round bets on over 80 startups. The thoroughbred in its stable is EigenLayer, which offers a type of crypto-based financial engineering known as restaking, and notched a $1.05 billion valuation last June following a $100 million Series B round led by Andreessen Horowitz.

The world of crypto investing hasn’t been so hot of late, with Dragonfly’s Rob Hadick going so far as to predict a “mass extinction event,” but Teo says Ethereal has been able to........

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