Portal Ventures

Evan Fisher founded Portal Ventures in 2022. He began his career in the Investment Banking Division at Goldman Sachs and then spent three years as a senior associate at Insight Partners; when founding Portal, he convinced several of Insight’s directors and some founders of Insight portfolio companies to back it.⁠[1][2][3][1]

On April 8, 2022, the first fund, Portal Ventures Fund I, LP, filed a Form D with the US Securities and Exchange Commission for a private offering, with Fisher as Managing Member of the fund’s General Partner.⁠[4][4]

On August 9, 2022, Portal Ventures announced that it had closed its first fund at $35 million, for pre-seed investments in crypto startups, focusing on “picks and shovels” projects such as infrastructure and developer tools; individuals from Insight Partners’ managing team made up the largest group of investors. The fund had made eight investments since January of that year, including the Web3 developer tooling startup Polywrap and the crypto gaming infrastructure startup Worlds.org; Ori Shimony served as a venture partner. Another account puts the first fund at $40 million, closed in early 2022; the two figures are inconsistent.⁠[3][3][3][3][3][1]

Fisher said most of the first fund’s investments were made during the crypto downturn of 2023, and that the fund had been fully deployed as of May 2024.⁠[1][1]

In November 2024, Portal Ventures was close to the final close of its second fund, a $75 million vehicle, with demand of about $90 million; a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission in August of that year showed an initial target size of $70 million. Limited partners include the fund of funds Accolade, the family office shared by Chris Dixon and Marc AndreessenMarc AndreessenMarc Andreessen is an American entrepreneur and venture capitalist, a co-founder and general partner of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). While in college he helped develop the graphical web browser Mosaic, then co-founded Netscape and Loudcloud (later renamed Opsware), and has long served as a director of Meta; he has also published essays such as “Why Software Is Eating the World.”Open the full entry, KKR’s Henry Kravis, and several managing directors of Insight Partners.⁠[1][1][1][1][1]

The second fund follows the same strategy of pre-seed first checks, with part of the capital also used to support portfolio companies from the first fund. Fisher and general partner Catrina WangCatrina WangCatrina Wang is a crypto venture capitalist and a general partner at Portal Ventures, a venture firm focused on leading pre-seed rounds in blockchain projects.Open the full entry summarize the strategy as finding the “deals before deals”; in 2023, they predicted that Bitcoin would become dominant and built investments around it, investing at the time in Arch, a Bitcoin-native DeFi platform. Wang co-founded Deloitte’s blockchain venture program.⁠[1][1][1][1][1]

On July 28, 2025, Portal Ventures Fund II, LP filed an amended Form D reporting a total offering amount of $80.5 million, with $80,380,850 sold to 53 investors.⁠[5][5][5]

On October 7, 2026, the New York–based retail proprietary trading startup Vest Labs announced that it had raised a $13 million seed round, which closed in July, led by Portal Ventures with participation from senior executives at Citadel SecuritiesCitadel SecuritiesCitadel Securities is an American market maker founded in Chicago in 2002 by Ken Griffin and partners and headquartered in Miami, providing liquidity to institutional and retail investors across a range of financial products. It is a separate company from Citadel, the hedge fund Griffin founded in 1990.Open the full entry, BlackRockBlackRockBlackRock is a publicly traded investment management company headquartered in New York, founded in 1988 by Larry Fink and seven others and listed on the New York Stock Exchange (ticker BLK); its businesses include the iShares family of exchange-traded funds and the Aladdin investment and risk management platform. As of June 30, 2026, its assets under management totaled $15.3 trillion.Open the full entry, and KKR in their individual capacity; Vest did not disclose its post-money valuation. Vest lets qualifying traders use company money to trade perpetual futures around the clock, with traders keeping up to 80% of their profits.⁠[6][6][6][6][6][6]

The investment began in 2024: at a University of Pennsylvania alumni event during the Stanford Blockchain Conference, Vest founder Justin MaJustin MaJustin Ma is the co-founder and chief executive officer of Vest Labs, a New York–based trading technology startup that operates Vest Markets, a perpetual futures trading and retail prop trading platform.Open the full entry met fellow alum Catrina Wang and pitched Vest to her for the first time. Wang said that Vest lets traders trade with company capital without using their own money, which is highly differentiated in attracting users.⁠[6][6][6]

As of October 2026, Portal Ventures specializes in leading pre-seed first checks before product-market fit and assists founders with business model design, go-to-market, and fundraising. The team consists of Founder and Managing Partner Evan Fisher, General Partner Catrina Wang, and Chief of Staff Evan Solomon.⁠[2][2][2][2][2]

Featured investments listed on its official website include the Bitcoin lending platform Arch Network, the institutional onchain yield infrastructure Concrete, the AI compute company Exabits (led seed round), Interval, the real-world asset platform Plume, Quip, the physical uranium exchange Uranium Digital, and Vest (led pre-seed).⁠[2][2][2][2][2][2][2][2]

Portal Ventures: Official website: https://www.portal.vc/ (opens in a new window).⁠[2]