Dekrypt Capital

Dekrypt Capital was co-founded by Howard Wu, a UC Berkeley alumnus known for co-authoring the Zexe paper on decentralized private computation. Wu and several partners came directly from Berkeley's computer science and cryptography programs, where research on zero-knowledge proofs and scalable consensus mechanisms informed the firm's investment thesis. Their academic grounding shapes a due-diligence process that emphasizes protocol security and cryptographic novelty over conventional venture metrics (per the firm's official communications).

Dekrypt sources a significant portion of its pipeline through the UC Berkeley cryptography and blockchain ecosystem, including the Center for Decentralized Intelligence and the RISELab. The firm's principals remain involved in academic research and open-source cryptographic development, which creates early visibility into projects before they raise publicly. This university-embedded model also grants access to graduate founders and faculty-led spinouts that often bypass traditional crypto VC networks.

Dekrypt runs a hybrid strategy through two vehicles: an early-stage venture fund for equity and token pre-seed to Series A rounds, and a liquid hedge fund for active participation in DeFi protocols and token markets. The venture arm writes initial checks between $250,000 and $2 million for teams building layer-1 and layer-2 infrastructure, privacy-preserving computation, and Web3 developer tooling. The liquid strategy focuses on network bootstrapping and validator participation in portfolio ecosystems like Avalanche.

Dekrypt's disclosed portfolio includes Ava Labs, the developer of the Avalanche blockchain, where the firm participated in early-stage funding and continued ecosystem support. The firm has also been involved with Zcash, backing the privacy-focused cryptocurrency's developer community and broader privacy infrastructure. Its investments cluster around zero-knowledge proof systems, confidential smart contracts, and modular blockchain architectures (public record).

Dekrypt operates as a crypto-native asset manager with both venture and liquid strategies under one roof. The structure includes an early-stage venture fund for illiquid equity and token investments, and a separate liquid fund that trades and provides liquidity in crypto markets. This dual-fund architecture allows it to support portfolio companies from pre-seed through token generation events and into active secondary markets.

Dekrypt Capital is headquartered in Berkeley, California, intentionally embedded within the UC Berkeley research community. No additional offices have been publicly disclosed. The firm maintains a lean, single-location presence to maximize its proximity to the academic cryptography and computer science departments that form the core of its sourcing and talent advantage.

Dekrypt targets the cryptographic backbone of Web3: zero-knowledge proofs, scalability solutions, privacy-preserving infrastructure, and protocol-level developer tooling. It avoids generalist consumer-app investments and instead concentrates on technical primitives — consensus mechanisms, verifiable computation, and inter-chain communication layers — where its founders' academic expertise provides a genuine edge in evaluating project feasibility.