One of Europe’s few female-led venture capital funds has raised $432 million to invest in early-stage tech startups in Europe, with over a third of the fund reserved for investments in the cryptocurrency ecosystem. 

The launch of the new fund comes shortly after one of Blossom Capital’s early investments Checkout.com was valued at over $40 billion, making it one of Europe’s most valuable startups, and lifts the assets managed by the London-based VC to almost $1 billion. Blossom’s largest investment to date has been into the British crypto fintech Moonpay, which raised a $555 Series A round in November, and the new focus on crypto marked the space becoming a mainstream asset class, says Ophelia Brown, managing partner of Blossom Capital.  

“I’ve personally been active in this space since buying my first bitcoin in 2012. So we’ve kind of debated every year now, when is the right time to keep increasing the exposure and make it core to the fund, and at the beginning of last year it was just so obvious that we will want to do more in that area,” says Brown, a Forbes 30 Under 30 alum.

Brown says her strategy of investing in early-stage startups like Irish security startup Tines and Berlin-based messaging platform SuperChat in Europe hadn’t changed, but the size of the fund had grown to accommodate the soaring valuation of Series A companies. “The change that has driven our fund size has been the growth of the Series A market; back in 2018 the average size was $8 million to $10 million—now we are seeing $20 million to $25 million, so we’re raising the fund size to accommodate that,” says Brown.  

Blossom Capital was founded by the former Insight Partners and LocalGlobe investor Brown in 2017 and hired Alex Lim as a co-managing partner from Silicon Valley-based fund IVP last year.