The fund aims to inject funds into emerging SoFi and GameFi projects, digital asset lending and borrowing, derivatives and tokenization services of real-world assets, among other areas of the cryptocurrency sector.

The Miami-based company was founded in January and has received investment from Marc Andreessen, Chris Dixon and Tampa Bay Lightning owner Jeff Vinik. Specializing in early-stage (pre-seed to Series A) blockchain-based applications, it aims to bridge digital asset investors and companies around the world, from East Asia to North America, by leveraging the experience of its co-founders Steve Lee and Michael Bucella.

“Our customers see us as one of the few channels connecting East and West,” Bucella told The Block. “Seeking long-term value and use in undercapitalized regions and sectors is how we find success.”

Bucella and Lee, who met at Goldman Sachs, most recently worked together at crypto investment firm BlockTower. Despite their shared experience, the two executives have very different backgrounds: American Bucella is a New York native, while South Korean-born Lee spent nearly 20 years in South Korea, Japan and Singapore.

According to the two partners, these differences enable them to act as conduits for Western projects to access investments and user bases in the East, as cryptocurrency adoption is much more advanced.

“Steve speaks Korean and Japanese, and I am monolingual but multicultural,” Bucella said. “This mix allows us to act very locally in key areas.” “Our customers don’t always feel ready to engage and collaborate with partners on the other side of the world, so we can be that communication channel for them,” he added.

In addition to bridging East and West, Bucella and Lee also united on another front: identifying and investing in new projects that were “somewhat oppositional.”

“Our goal is to invest in things where you can look back in five or 10 years and say, ‘we were the first dollar into the company, making it the first project to have 10 or 100 million daily active users for a long time,’” Bucella said.

Neoclassic Capital has received investments in recent months from international investors such as Genki Oda, an executive at SBI Holdings, and Zurich-based investment advisor L1 Digital AG, Bloomberg reported. The funds will support their mission to fuel the growth of new players in the crypto space.

Beyond this, Neoclassic Capital also plans to launch hedge funds, growth stocks, credit and other projects.