The venture capitalists who made their names betting on blockchain are increasingly writing checks somewhere else: artificial intelligence. A growing number of crypto-focused VC funds are widening their mandates to back AI, robotics and fintech startups — not just web3 — as the once-frothy market for pure-crypto deals cools, The Block reported.

A quick primer: venture capital (VC) is money invested in early-stage private companies in exchange for equity, usually pooled into a fund with a stated focus, or "mandate." For years, crypto VCs raised funds to back web3 — blockchain-based apps, tokens and infrastructure. Now several are rewriting that brief.

Following the money

The pattern is visible across the industry's biggest names. Framework Ventures has closed a fund aimed at "frontier technologies" spanning crypto, AI, robotics and energy. Paradigm, one of crypto's marquee investors, is reported to be raising a large new fund covering crypto and AI and robotics. Haun Ventures, founded by former a16z partner Katie Haun, has raised a billion-dollar vehicle with an explicit eye on AI-agent technology that overlaps with crypto. Even YZi Labs — the firm formerly known as Binance Labs — has pushed into AI and biotech.

Not everyone is pivoting. a16z crypto has raised a fresh multi-billion-dollar fund while keeping a dedicated crypto mandate, and some firms are doubling down on web3. But the drift is unmistakable.

Why now

Two forces are pulling in the same direction. First, crypto deal flow has thinned. By industry counts, the number of crypto VC deals fell sharply in 2025 from the prior year — leaving funds raised for the web3 wave struggling to find enough startups worth backing.

Second, AI is hoovering up venture money at a historic clip; by various tallies, AI absorbed well over half of all global VC funding in 2025. Crypto investors, sitting on capital and founder networks that touch both worlds, are following the money. One reported figure captures it: a large and rising share of every crypto-VC dollar went to AI-linked startups last year.

The convergence thesis (and the skeptics)

The charitable read isn't "abandoning crypto for the hot thing" — it's convergence. Crypto and AI genuinely overlap in several places: decentralized compute networks that rent out GPUs for AI training, AI agents that use stablecoins as native money to transact autonomously, and blockchains used to verify where AI's data and outputs come from. To these investors, AI isn't a detour from crypto so much as the next layer of the same stack.

The less charitable read is simpler: when one sector cools and another catches fire, capital chases heat. The bar for founders is rising either way — investors now expect more traction and revenue before committing than they did in the free-spending boom. And some managers privately doubt that crypto-bred firms will out-pick dedicated AI investors at their own game.

What it signals

For the crypto industry, the migration is a double-edged signal. It shows the sector's investors are maturing and pragmatic, willing to go where returns are — and it underscores how thoroughly AI has become the gravitational center of technology investing, bending even crypto's true believers into its orbit. For founders building purely on-chain, it is a warning that the easy money has moved on. The interesting question for the next few years is whether "crypto VC" and "AI VC" remain meaningfully different labels at all.