Pragma Ventures

Four partners share responsibility: Yaroslav Hayduk, Myeongjae Jeon, Roy Koo, and Youngseok Yang. All four hold computer-science doctorates or equivalent industry research experience. The group operates with a flat structure, and each partner contributes to sourcing, technical due diligence, and post-investment support.

The team has published original research on consensus protocols and AI-systems inference. Youngseok Yang discovered two critical consensus bugs in the Ethereum protocol, one of which forced a network hard fork in November 2020. Myeongjae Jeon’s lab at POSTECH develops large-model training platforms with Kakao and Samsung. Those capabilities transfer directly to portfolio support instead of being outsourced to third-party auditors.

Pragma invests directly in equity and token rounds of early-stage startups. There is no publicly available information suggesting the firm commits capital to external venture funds or acts as a limited partner in other managers’ vehicles.

Sourcing combines three channels: academic networks through Myeongjae Jeon’s POSTECH lab and the team’s computer-science conference presence, Roy Koo’s decade-plus in Korean venture capital, and inbound referrals from the Ethereum core-developer community, where Youngseok Yang is a recognized contributor on the bounty program leaderboard.

Pragma describes itself as a research-oriented fund that works hands-on with portfolio companies. Public materials highlight direct post-investment technical support but do not explicitly mention structured co-investment programs or syndicate partnerships with other general partners.

The firm’s published focus statement favours projects that are contrarian and challenge Web3’s foundations. It does not list any sectors as strictly excluded, but its concentration on distributed-systems infrastructure, consensus mechanisms, AI/crypto convergence, and Bitcoin-layer innovation implies limited appetite for consumer-only applications or passive yield products.

Youngseok Yang, a partner at Pragma Ventures, is the CEO and founder of Nodeinfra, a blockchain node infrastructure provider. Nodeinfra operates separately as a business, but its operational knowledge of validator and RPC infrastructure flows into Pragma’s evaluation of protocol-layer investments.