Yang Ventures

Yang Ventures is a small seed-stage venture firm founded in 2012 by Terrence Yang and based in Los Angeles, California. Yang is a Harvard Law J.D. who was previously Vice President at Morgan Stanley, Director and Senior Counsel at Merrill Lynch, and Managing Director at a $1B-plus fund, and he has been investing and advising in crypto since 2014, having personally sourced and analyzed more than 200 token white papers, including Quantstamp, in which he holds QSP tokens. The firm's thesis centers on fintech, lawtech, privacy, and crypto and Bitcoin startups, and it explicitly limits itself to deals where the founders are long-standing friends of Terrence or where the firm believes it has a 'big unfair advantage' and can be a meaningful value-add to the team, generally as a co-investor. Tickets are intentionally small, typically $25K with a range of $10K to $100K, making Yang Ventures more of a strategic friends-and-family or solo-capitalist vehicle than a traditional institutional fund. The portfolio includes roughly 13 companies, with notable holdings in Layer1, Quantstamp, Nova, Coinbase, BITMAIN and Airship. Most recent disclosed activity was participation in the Series B of civic-engagement platform Polco in May 2023. Its geographic focus is the United States with selective Asia activity, particularly around crypto and digital assets. By writing small, highly selective checks into founders it knows well or where it holds an unfair advantage, Yang Ventures backs fintech, lawtech, privacy and crypto startups as a strategic solo-capitalist vehicle.