Hack Vc

Hack VC is not a typical venture capital firm. It was built by hackers for hackers, a thesis-driven fund that has been backing Web3 founders since 2014—long before the space had institutional credibility. Today, with $425M in assets under management across two funds, Hack VC remains one of the most conviction-driven investors in crypto infrastructure, developer tools, and the emerging AI x crypto convergence.

The firm was co-founded by Alex Pack and Ed Roman, both of whom cut their teeth in the crypto trenches. Pack spent years at Dragonfly Capital before launching Hack VC in 2020. Roman, an experienced operator and author of a best-selling programming book, built the Hack.Summit() conference into one of the most recognized developer events in crypto before entering venture full-time. Together, they raised a $200M Crypto Seed Fund in 2021 backed by Sequoia Capital, Fidelity, Andreessen Horowitz, and Chris Dixon—then closed a $150M Venture Fund I in February 2024, oversubscribed.

What makes Hack VC stand out is its willingness to lead rounds at the earliest stages when most institutional capital is still sitting on the sidelines. The firm actively leads or co-leads pre-seed and Series A deals, deploying $3M to $25M per company with a focus on founders who can articulate technical differentiation, not just business model narratives.

The firm operates from San Francisco and New York, and has built a reputation for being accessible to technical founders who might not have warm intros to top-tier firms. Hack VC reads code. Partners personally review GitHub histories, system architecture, and developer communities to evaluate whether a founding team can actually build what they promise.

If you are a Web3 founder at the earliest stages—pre-seed through Series A—understanding Hack VC's specific thesis, portfolio, and process is essential for making a credible ask for capital. This guide covers everything from what the firm actually looks for to how they think about the AI x crypto intersection that now dominates their public thesis.

Hack VC's investment thesis has sharpened considerably since its earliest days. The firm started as a broad crypto investor but has narrowed into a focused bet on Web3 infrastructure—the foundational layer that the next generation of internet applications will be built upon. This is not a thesis born of trend-chasing; it reflects the partners' view that crypto infrastructure remains dramatically underbuilt relative to the applications it will support.

The core thesis rests on three structural pillars. First, decentralized infrastructure: Hack VC looks for projects building the primitives—protocols, SDKs, developer platforms, and rollup architectures—that other applications will depend on. Second, financial protocols and DeFi primitives: the firm has been a consistent backer of novel lending, stablecoin, derivatives, and exchange infrastructure. Third, the AI x crypto convergence: Hack VC was early to identify this theme and has since invested in several projects attempting to bring decentralized compute and inference to AI workloads.

In public writings, managing partner Ed Roman has articulated a 'Movement' thesis centered on the Move programming language and its migration from Sui and Aptos to Ethereum via L2s. Hack VC led Movement Labs' Series A, arguing that Move's type-safety and formal verification properties make smart contract development significantly more secure than Solidity equivalents. The firm also led Babylon's Series A around Bitcoin staking infrastructure, and has published detailed theses on Nillion's privacy-preserving compute network.

At the pre-seed and seed stages, Hack VC focuses on teams with genuine technical depth. The firm is skeptical of founders who can only describe product-market fit in vague terms. Partners want to see code quality, architectural reasoning, and an honest assessment of what the hardest engineering problems are. Hack VC has passed on many 'hot' deals because the technical differentiation was thin.

Hack VC's most significant recent milestone was the February 2024 close of its $150M Venture Fund I, which was oversubscribed despite a challenging fundraising environment for crypto funds. The round attracted backing from traditional institutional investors who had previously been reluctant to enter the crypto venture space, signaling growing mainstream acceptance of Web3 infrastructure as a legitimate asset class.

The firm's deal pace has accelerated in 2024 and 2025, with notable new positions including Miden ($25M round co-led with a16z crypto and 1kx in April 2025), a zero-knowledge edge blockchain targeting mobile and IoT use cases. Hack VC also participated in Dinari's $12.7M Series A in May 2025, a tokenized stock infrastructure play operating on Avalanche. The firm led Nillion's $20M Series A in mid-2024 for decentralized privacy compute, and led a $30M Series A in Monkey Tilt for on-chain derivatives and structured products.

On the AI x crypto front, Hack VC's most visible bet remains 0G Labs, which raised a $40M seed round led by Hack VC in November 2024 to build the first decentralized AI operating system. 0G subsequently raised an additional $250M token purchase commitment and an $88.8M ecosystem fund, making it one of the best-capitalized AI x crypto projects in the space. 0G trained the world's largest decentralized AI model at 107 billion parameters in 2025—eight months before the broader industry caught up to similar announcements.

The firm's investment activity reflects a deliberate choice to lead rounds rather than follow. Hack VC's brand has become strong enough that many promising Web3 infrastructure founders now seek the firm out specifically for lead coverage. However, the partners remain accessible to cold submissions from technical teams that can demonstrate genuine building capability.

0G Labs is Hack VC's flagship AI x crypto bet. The company is building infrastructure for decentralized AI training and inference—the plumbing that would allow AI models to run on-chain, with verifiable computation and open weight access. 0G's $40M seed round led by Hack VC in November 2024 was one of the largest seed deals in crypto that cycle, and the project has since attracted investments from Delphi Digital, OKX Ventures, Samsung Next, and Animoca Brands. The company is headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Babylon Labs is addressing one of Bitcoin's most persistent limitations: its inability to participate in DeFi as a productive asset. Babylon's Bitcoin staking protocol allows BTC holders to stake their coins without custody transfer, creating a new yield source and bringing Bitcoin into the broader DeFi ecosystem. Hack VC led Babylon's Series A in late 2023 and has been an active supporter as the protocol has progressed toward mainnet.

Nillion is building a privacy-preserving computing network that enables secure multi-party computation without relying on traditional zero-knowledge proof infrastructure. Hack VC led Nillion's $20M Series A in June 2024, betting that privacy will become a critical primitive for both DeFi and enterprise blockchain applications. The project is developing what it calls a 'nil message' protocol that allows data to be computed on without being revealed.

Miden is an edge blockchain project that raised $25M in April 2025 from Hack VC, a16z crypto, and 1kx. Built by the Polygon Miden team, it targets zero-knowledge proofs for resource-constrained environments—mobile devices, IoT sensors, and edge nodes—where traditional ZK rollups are too heavy to run. The thesis centers on a future where billions of devices need fast, verifiable on-chain state.

Dinari is bringing tokenized stocks to blockchain infrastructure, enabling on-chain trading of real-world asset securities. Hack VC led the $12.7M Series A in May 2025, betting that regulated tokenized securities will become a major DeFi vertical. The company operates on Avalanche and is building the infrastructure for non-U.S. investors to access tokenized equities.

Technical depth is non-negotiable at Hack VC. Partners Alex Pack and Ed Roman have both been known to request GitHub access, review pull request history, and ask detailed questions about system architecture in first meetings. This is not a firm that will back a slide deck with a compelling narrative but no evidence of building ability. Founders should come prepared to discuss their engineering tradeoffs, the hardest problems they have solved, and the ones they have not yet solved.

Market opportunity is evaluated with particular attention to whether the project is building infrastructure for a future that is actually coming, versus chasing a current narrative. Hack VC asks: if this primitive works at scale, does the world look meaningfully different? Projects that describe billion-dollar total addressable markets without explaining why this specific infrastructure unlocks that TAM tend to get pushed toward clearer problem statements.

Founder quality at Hack VC means genuine builder orientation, not just entrepreneurial ambition. The ideal Hack VC founder is a hacker first—someone who would be building this regardless of whether venture capital existed. The firm is explicitly friendly to technical co-founders who can write production code or design novel cryptographic protocols, not just business-side founders with domain experience.

Competitive positioning is evaluated through the lens of whether the project has a structural moat that improves with network effects or time. Pure software commoditization is a red flag; Hack VC wants to see paths to defensibility whether through IP, ecosystem lock-in, or cryptographic innovations that are difficult for competitors to replicate.

The firm also evaluates the broader ecosystem positioning of a project—specifically whether a new project is actually building on top of or alongside existing infrastructure in ways that create cooperative value. Hack VC has shown appetite for backing projects that might compete with parts of the existing Web3 stack if the technical leap is significant enough.

Warm introductions from credible members of the Web3 developer ecosystem are the most reliable path to a first meeting with Hack VC. The firm is genuinely accessible to developers who are active contributors to open-source crypto projects, members of well-known hackathon communities, or alumni of notable crypto infrastructure teams. An introduction from a portfolio founder or another respected crypto investor will typically result in a 30-minute introductory call.

Cold submissions through the Hack VC website are accepted and reviewed, but the bar is high. A cold pitch to Hack VC needs to lead with technical differentiation—not a business model deck. The best cold submissions describe a genuinely hard engineering problem, explain why the founder team is uniquely positioned to solve it, and show evidence of real building (code repositories, published research, working prototypes). A polished pitch deck without technical substance will not advance.

The firm has a particular affinity for founders who are working on problems they have personally encountered. Projects that emerge from a founder's direct experience debugging a real infrastructure limitation, or building an application that hit a scaling wall, tend to resonate more than those built from second-hand market research.

Hack VC has published extensive public investment theses on their blog—Ed Roman's writing on Babylon, Nillion, and Movement Labs is unusually detailed for a VC. Reading these posts before reaching out is valuable not just for understanding the firm's thinking, but for calibrating your pitch to the specific vocabulary and analytical framework Hack VC uses.

Follow-on communication after an initial meeting should include substantive progress updates, not just promotional announcements. Hack VC values founders who give honest assessments of what is not working and what they are doing about it. If the firm passes on your round, a brief note thanking them for their time and offering to keep them posted on progress often leads to renewed conversation in 12 to 18 months.

Even for pre-revenue infrastructure companies, Hack VC expects founders to have a clear mental model of unit economics and path to sustainability. For DeFi protocols, this often means explaining the flywheel that drives protocol revenue—for infrastructure companies, it means being able to articulate the pricing model and what willingness to pay looks like from downstream developers.

For companies at Series A stage, Hack VC will scrutinize key metrics like developer adoption velocity, protocol revenue if applicable, and the efficiency of token distribution if a token is part of the design. The firm has seen enough DeFi and infrastructure cycles to know the difference between organic growth and farming campaigns.

Hack VC's financial due diligence is lighter for pre-seed and seed stage companies but increases meaningfully at Series A. Founders at Series A should be prepared to present a 12 to 18 month roadmap with explicit milestones, burn rate assumptions, and a clear raise-purpose narrative that ties capital deployment to specific engineering or growth outcomes.

Given the complexity of crypto financial modeling—token vesting schedules, protocol treasury operations management, gas cost dynamics—founders who can speak fluently about on-chain financial mechanics make a stronger impression than those who treat finance as an afterthought. Hack VC respects founders who have clearly thought through the economic design of their systems, not just the technical design.

For direct access to Hack VC's portfolio, investment theses, and contact information, visit the firm's official website at https://www.hack.vc/. The site features detailed case studies of their investments, Ed Roman's blog posts on specific thesis areas, and a submission portal for founders seeking funding.

Researching other Web3-focused venture firms? Our VC firm guides provide detailed coverage of crypto-native investors across all stages and sectors.

Each review is researched individually with real portfolio data, check sizes, and thesis specifics—never template text. Explore the full collection to find the right fit for your blockchain infrastructure company.

Finding an investor whose thesis genuinely aligns with your technical approach is one of the most consequential decisions a Web3 founder will make. Take time to read each firm's public writings before reaching out.