Kyle Samani

Samani was born in 1990. He attended New York University from 2008 to 2012, earning a BS in Finance and Management from the Stern School of Business, and met his future partner Tushar Jain there; he recalled that although the two studied finance, they were always more interested in tech. After his junior year he moved back to Austin, Texas, and before graduating he chose to forgo a finance career and joined local health IT company VersaSuite, working in engineering and later sales and product management. In the fourth quarter of 2012 he was the company’s product manager for all clinical applications and project manager for two hospital electronic medical record deployments; in May 2013 he also traveled to Peru on VersaSuite’s behalf to present its hospital information system and EHR software to a hospital.⁠[1][2][3][4][4][3][5][3][6][7]

Starting January 1, 2013, Samani began blogging in preparation for starting a health IT company, writing 156 posts that year and becoming a contributor to the health IT blog HIStalk. After Google announced Google Glass that February, he decided to build Glass software for healthcare, quit VersaSuite, and on May 15 co-founded Pristine with a friend he had met in a high school computer science class; he later wrote that quitting was probably the most difficult thing he had ever done. Pristine joined the Austin incubator Capital Factory in August, and its first customer was UC Irvine; its product EyeSight was a HIPAA-compliant, first-person audio and video streaming tool built for Google Glass.⁠[8][8][8][2][6][2][2][8][9]

Pristine later broadened its work to remote collaboration for field service, training and audits in the life sciences, industrial equipment and healthcare. Within a year of joining Capital Factory it raised $1.1 million in seed funding, and in September 2014 it raised a $4.3 million Series A led by S3 Ventures; as of April 2015 it had raised $5.4 million in total and had more than 20 employees and 30 customers. Samani wrote that he could directly attribute $300,000 of the $1 million seed financing to his blog.⁠[2][2][2][8]

Samani and Tushar Jain wrote that they had been investing in crypto assets since 2013, got serious in early 2016 after developing deep conviction in Ethereum’s technical vision, and doubled down on Ethereum through the DAO crisis that summer. After Ethereum surged in 2017 and friends kept asking which crypto funds they could invest in, the two began working on Multicoin Capital in earnest in May, held its first close on August 1 and announced it on August 8; the fund invested exclusively in liquid crypto assets such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, held 25 assets at launch, and offered “venture economics with public market liquidity.” The firm officially launched on October 1, 2017, with Samani as managing partner.⁠[3][3][3][3][3][3][3][3][10][11][12]

In May 2018, Samani led Multicoin’s participation in SolanaSolanaSolana is a proof-of-stake (PoS) public blockchain designed for high throughput and low latency, with SOL as its native token; it was developed by Solana Labs and launched Mainnet Beta in March 2020. It is known for design choices such as its Proof of History clock and parallel execution, suffered several network-wide outages in its early years, and became one of the crypto industry’s focal points in events including the FTX collapse, U.S. SEC lawsuits, and the listing of Solana ETFs.Open the full entry’s seed round and went on to lead the other two rounds before Solana’s mainnet launch in March 2020, which became his best-known investment. In December 2021, he said on a podcast that Multicoin had bought SOL over three private rounds at $0.04, $0.20 and $0.23 per token.⁠[13][12][12][14]

Investments Samani announced on Multicoin’s behalf during this period included participation in zero-knowledge proof company StarkWareStarkWareStarkWare is a blockchain technology company headquartered in Netanya, Israel, founded in 2018 by STARK proof co-inventor Eli Ben-Sasson and others. It uses zero-knowledge proofs to provide scaling, privacy and quantum-resistance solutions for Ethereum and other blockchains, has developed the StarkEx scaling engine, the Cairo programming language and the Stone and S-two provers, and leads development of the layer-2 network Starknet; its last funding round, in 2022, valued it at $8 billion.Open the full entry’s $30 million Series A in October 2018, leading blockchain indexing protocol The Graph’s $2.5 million seed round in January 2019, and co-leading a $73 million investment in fully homomorphic encryption company Zama alongside Protocol Labs in March 2024. He has also written that he helped design Helium’s token incentives in 2019.⁠[15][16][17][18]

Since 2022, Samani has worked directly with members of the U.S. Congress and the administration on key regulatory issues affecting the crypto industry.⁠[1]

In January 2025, Samani published Multicoin’s fifth Solana investment thesis, arguing that Solana is the leading chain to power “Internet Capital Markets” and can outperform traditional finance giants such as the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq on core performance metrics such as latency; he is also known for popularizing that tagline. That year Multicoin co-led a $28 million round in DoubleZero, which provides dedicated fiber networking for blockchains and launched on mainnet-beta on October 1.⁠[13][13][13][4][19][19][19]

In September 2025, Multicoin, Jump Crypto and Galaxy led a $1.65 billion private investment in public equity (PIPE) in Nasdaq-listed Forward Industries to launch a treasury strategy centered on SOL, with each sponsor committing more than $100 million and Samani personally committing an additional $25 million. On September 10, Forward’s board appointed Samani, then 35, as a director and chairman; he bought 1,351,352 shares through his personal investment vehicle. He said he had been one of Solana’s earliest and loudest champions, that Solana was still “widely misunderstood and discounted” by the market, that this asymmetry created a tremendous opportunity for a Solana treasury strategy, and that an institutional-scale treasury could be deployed within the ecosystem to increase SOL per share faster than passive holding. When the PIPE closed, Samani said the milestone reflected leading institutional investors’ belief that Solana belongs at the center of global capital markets; he also said his role at Multicoin was unchanged.⁠[20][20][1][1][1][21][21][21][22][22][20]

Forward’s board determined that Samani was an independent chairman; from October 2025 the company paid non-executive directors $100,000 a year, which Samani does not receive. As of the record date for the annual meeting in January 2026, he beneficially owned 13,757,991 shares, or 15.6%, including shares held by Multicoin’s master fund, over which he and Tushar Jain share voting and investment power.⁠[23][24][24][23][23]

On February 4, 2026, Multicoin wrote to its partners that Samani would transition from a management to an advisory role, adding that it did not anticipate any disruption to the business. Samani said on X that it was a “bittersweet moment,” that he would take some time off and explore other areas of technology such as AI, robotics and longevity, that he was still “mega long SOL, mega long crypto,” and that he was optimistic about the wave of new entrants the CLARITY Act would bring; he also said he would keep making personal investments and supporting Multicoin portfolio companies.⁠[14][14][25][25][25][14][25][25]

Hours earlier, he had posted and then deleted a message saying “I once believed in the web3 vision. Dapps. I don’t anymore,” and that crypto was fundamentally not as interesting as many enthusiasts, himself included, had wanted, though prices would go higher. He also said he would redeem his interest in Multicoin’s master fund in kind in Forward Industries shares and warrants, substantially increasing his personal economic exposure to Forward, and would remain Forward’s chairman.⁠[14][14][14][14][14][14]

On March 3, 2026, Forward Industries’ annual meeting re-elected Samani as a director with 52,119,875 votes for and 11,118 withheld.⁠[26][26]

After stepping back from Multicoin’s management, he kept writing about his investment views. In March he argued that AI agents could carry out ever-longer tasks and that the long-term durability of purely software companies faced a fundamental question within five years; the same month he argued that proprietary automated market-making algorithms running directly on Solana mainnet (PropAMMs) were a major evolution in market microstructure and predicted that Solana mainnet would rival all centralized exchanges for spot and perpetuals by the end of 2026. In June, he said he had spent the past few months accumulating GEOD, the token of the high-precision positioning network Geodnet, and had presented on it at the All In Liquidity Summit on June 2.⁠[27][27][28][28][18][18]

On September 2, 2026, crypto exchange and wallet company BackpackBackpackBackpack is a digital asset and securities services brand that grew out of a self-custodial wallet in the Solana ecosystem; it was founded by Armani Ferrante, who serves as CEO. Its businesses include Backpack Wallet, Backpack Exchange, the Mad Lads community and Backpack Securities, with wallet, trading and securities services provided through operating entities in different regions.Open the full entry announced Samani’s appointment to the board of Backpack US. Backpack CEO Armani Ferrante said Samani’s deep experience in building and shaping decentralized financial networks, together with his longstanding advocacy for clear, workable rules for the crypto industry, made him an ideal addition to the board. Samani said the future of global capital markets is not DeFi versus TradFi but integrating the best of both: institutional risk controls with on-chain efficiency and transparency.⁠[29][29][29][29]

The same day he wrote that when Ferrante asked him to join Backpack’s board a few months earlier he was not yet an investor and said yes immediately; he then invested $1 million and, as his conviction grew over the following two months, another $3 million, for a total of $4 million, his largest single angel investment to date. He said Backpack held licenses in major jurisdictions including Europe, Asia, Australia and Japan, intended to be a major player in centralized perpetuals in the U.S., and would power regulated on-chain equities and derivatives on Solana.⁠[30][30][30][30][30][30][30]

As of October 2026, Samani is chairman of Forward Industries and a board member of Backpack and fully homomorphic encryption company Zama, and his X profile says he is building a new company on Solana. He splits his time between Austin, Texas, and Park City, Utah, and is investing in startups and funds across all sectors.⁠[12][12][12][31][12][12]

Samani has written regularly since 2013: his posts from his startup years mostly covered health IT and Google Glass, while his Multicoin-era writing focused on token economics and blockchain analysis, such as “Understanding Token Velocity” (2017). His self-selected representative works include “Don’t Be Short Intelligence” (2026), “The Solana Thesis: Internet Capital Markets” (2025), “Tesla Is Not A Car Company” (2017) and “Autonomous Cars Break Uber” (2015).⁠[8][32][33][34][35]

The portfolio listed on his personal website spans crypto and finance (Forward Industries, Jito, Kalshi, Solana, Kamino, Zama and others), decentralized physical infrastructure networks (Geodnet, Helium, Hivemapper), health (Eight Sleep, Hone Health and others) and hard tech (humanoid robotics company Apptronik, genetic engineering company Colossal Biosciences, quantum computing company PsiQuantum and others).⁠[36][36][36][36][36][36][36][36][36]

Personal website: https://kylesamani.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[31]

X: Public account: https://x.com/KyleSamani (opens in a new window)⁠[31][4]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kylesamani (opens in a new window)⁠[4]

Forward Industries: Official website: https://forwardindustries.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[4]

Multicoin Capital: Official website: https://multicoin.capital/ (opens in a new window).⁠[4]

Backpack: Official website: https://backpack.exchange/ (opens in a new window).⁠[29]

Zama: Official website: https://zama.ai/ (opens in a new window).⁠[4]