Goldman Sachs alumni launch crypto VC Neoclassic Capital

A duo of Goldman Sachs Group alumni has launched Neoclassic Capital, a crypto-focused investment firm.

The fund aims to inject capital into up-and-coming SoFi and GameFi projects, as well as digital asset lending and borrowing, derivatives and real-world asset tokenization services, among other sectors of the cryptocurrency industry.

The Miami-based firm , founded in January, has secured investments from Marc Andreessen, Chris Dixon, and Tampa Bay Lightning owner Jeff Vinik. It specializes in working with early-stage (pre-seed to series A) blockchain-based applications, parlaying the experiences of its co-founders, Steve Lee and Michael Bucella, to bridge the gap between digital asset investors and companies across the world, from East Asia to North America.

"[Our clients] see us as one of the few conduits connecting the East and West,” Bucella told The Block. “How we generate success is looking for long-term value and usage in undercapitalized regions and sectors.”

Bucella and Lee, who met at Goldman Sachs, most recently worked together at crypto investment firm BlockTower. Despite their shared experiences, the two executives come from very different backgrounds: Bucella, an American, is from New York, while South Korea-born Lee has spent roughly 20 years living in South Korea, Japan and Singapore.

According to the two partners, those differences enable them to act as conduits for Western projects to access investments and user bases in the East, where crypto adoption is much further along and vice versa.

“Steve has native fluency in Korean and Japanese… and I'm monolingual, but I speak multicultural,” Bucella said. “The blend allows us to act very locally in the regions where it matters.”

He added, “Our clients don't always... feel prepared to interact and engage with partners on the other side of the world, and so we can be that communication channel for them.”

In addition to bridging the East and the West, Bucella and Lee are united on another front: Identifying and investing in emerging projects that are “somewhat contrarian.”

“Our goal is to.. invest in the things that in five [or] 10 years you look back and say, ‘we were the first dollar into the company that became the first [project with] 10 or 100 million daily active users for sustained periods of time,’” Bucella told The Block.

In recent months, Neoclassic Capital has accepted investments from international investors such as Genki Oda, an executive at SBI Holdings and the Zurich-based investment advisor L1 Digital AG, Bloomberg reported. The funds will fuel their mission to boost the growth of emerging players in the crypto space.

Beyond that, Neoclassic Capital also plans to launch hedge funds, growth equity, credit and other projects.