Gemini Exchange Confirms $400M Funding Round, With $7.1B Valuation
New York-based crypto exchange Gemini, founded by Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, has confirmed a $400 million fundraising deal that values the company at around $7.1 billion.
After seven years of funding their Gemini cryptocurrency empire out of pocket, Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss have confirmed closing a $400 million investment round that would value the Gemini parent company at $7.1 billion.
The Series D capital raise was led by capital management firm Morgan Creek Digital and brought in money from crypto venture capital firm ParaFi Capital, Pantera, VanEck, Jay-Z’s Marcy Venture Partners, former Disney chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg’s WnderCo, the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, and private equity firm 10T, amongst others.
According to the Forbes, Morgan Creek invested $75 million, and general partner Sachin Jaitly became the third member of Gemini’s board of directors, joining Tyler and Cameron as the remaining two board members.
While the valuation is one-tenth of rival exchange Coinbase’s $70 billion valuation and less than the $10-20 billion valuation Kraken seeks, the twins, who are expected to retain 75% ownership of the company, would see their combined net worth almost double, from $6 billion in April to $10.5 billion today.
The Winklevoss twins gained fame around 2004 when they sued Mark Zuckerberg for allegedly stealing their HarvardConnection (later renamed ConnectU) idea to create the largely successful social networking site Facebook. After first discovering Bitcoin in 2012, the twins got more heavily involved in crypto, eventually founding Gemini two years later, in 2014.
Now the brother also known as, Winklevii seem ready to take on Zuckerberg in the metaverse. In 2019, two years before Facebook announced their rebranding to Meta, Gemini bought NFT marketplace Nifty, marking their first venture into the metaverse. Since then, they have been heavily investing in related projects. Besides investing in projects like The Sandbox and Decentraland in a personal capacity, more than half of Gemini Frontier Fund’s portfolio consists of firms related to the metaverse.
Commenting on their strategic shift away from the “meatspace,” the Winklevoss twins told Forbes that they want to see the Gemini exchange being used by traders in the metaverse. They said:
“Instead of building brick and mortar bank branches in meatspace, we’re gonna build a Gemini experience in different metaverses, where you can go into Gemini, and trade but it would be immersive instead of on your phone.”
In an industry where reach is so directly correlated to value, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit and most other mainstream social networks have what seems to be an insurmountable lead. For now, they are the epitome of Walled Gardens. DeSo hopes to solve this problem by building a shared infrastructure on which anyone can create a social network of their own.
There’s already 150 projects being built on the blockchain, including 8 social networks, and a metaverse. Tyler Winklevoss said:
“It’s very easy to identify the problems with the existing networks and social spaces. But there haven’t been many solutions.
We believe crypto offers that, so we’ll continue to look at investing through Gemini Frontier, or maybe even building.”
