Aglaé Ventures, a technology investment company backed by Arnault, launches a 100 million euro Web3 fund

Quick take:

• Aglaé Ventures made its first foray into Web3 by co-leading a $30 million seed round for a crypto-asset trading solution, Flowdesk.
• The fund will target centralized and decentralized finance, web3 infrastructure, blockchain scalability specialists and more.
• The Arnault family has made strides into the crypto and Web3 space this year.

Aglaé Ventures, the technology investment vehicle of Agache (formerly Groupe Arnault), is set to launch a dedicated €100 million Web3 fund, sources tell The Block.

Aglaé’s plan to launch a Web3 fund has been confirmed by three people familiar with the matter. Two of these people said that the size of the fund would be between 100 and 110 million euros.

The Paris-based venture capital firm has previously backed Web2 giants such as Airbnb, Netflix, Slack and Spotify. He made his first foray into Web3 by co-leading a $30 million round for crypto-asset trading solution Flowdesk. However, the investment did not come from the crypto fund, which has not yet made its investment public.

This new Web3 fund follows the appointments of former CoinFund portfolio growth manager Vanessa Grellet and former Aave COO Jordan Lazaro Gustave to lead Aglaé’s crypto investment.

According to Blockworks, Gustave and Grellet will target investments in decentralized and centralized finance, web3 infrastructure, layer 1 and 2 scalability, and the creator economy.

“It was a very successful VC in Web2, but they were seeing a lot of things happening in Web3 and wanted to hire someone who is a specialist to handle that part of their investments,” Grellet told Blockworks after his appointment in May.

Agache is the majority shareholder of luxury giant LVMH, owned by Bernard Arnault. In February, the LVMH CEO expressed his skepticism about getting into Web3, saying, “At this point, we’re really in the real world, selling real products. We are not interested in selling virtual sneakers for 10 euros. We are not in there. However, he also said that the company will look into the applications of NFTs and the metaverse.

Despite this, the descendants of LVMH have made strides in the crypto and Web3 space this year. Alexandre Arnault, Executive Vice President of Products and Communications at Tiffany & Co. joined the CryptoPunks community in February. Alexandre Arnault also recently led the NFTiff project, which turns CryptoPunks into personalized pendants.

Tiffany & Co. marked its entry into the Web3 space with the acquisition of “Okapi” by Tom Sachs in March for $380,000. NFT art is now the company’s Twitter profile picture. In the same month, Alexandre Arnault managed to win bids on three of the 10 rarest HypeBear NFTs and flipped them for thousands of dollars in profit after allegedly trading with inside information.

Alexandre Arnault’s younger brother, Frédéric Arnault, is the CEO of Tag Heuer. The Swiss luxury watchmaker is preparing to accept cryptocurrencywhich the young Arnault believed would “profoundly transform” the industry and beyond.

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