# Faction

> Faction is a VC fund in Menlo Park backing Blockchain and Cryptocurrency. See 41 investments, check sizes, portfolio and contact details. Updated Aug 2026.

- Type: VC Fund
- Location: Menlo Park, United States
- Total investments: 41
- Last investment: Jun 2025
- Lead investor: 51%
- Last updated: Aug 2026
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/factionvc
- X (Twitter): https://twitter.com/FactionVC
- Website: https://www.faction.vc

Faction is a VC fund in Menlo Park focused on Blockchain and Cryptocurrency. Lightspeed Faction is a joint venture with Lightspeed Venture Partners, and as a result, combines Faction's crypto-only approach with Lightspeed's deep Silicon Valley roots and platform business scaling resources. Faction collaborates with Lightspeed on blockchain-related matters, but operates the fund independently.

## Contacts

5 contacts available for Faction. Shizune tracks 7 team members at Faction. Sign up free to unlock them: https://app.shizune.co/sign-up/investor-profiles/find-team-emails/lightspeed-faction?utm_source=investor_profile

## Round sizes

| Stage | Round size |
| --- | --- |
| Seed | $3.1M–$7.5M |
| Series A | $11M–$60M |

## Investment focus

### Industry

| Industry | Investments | Share |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Blockchain | 19 | 46% |
| Cryptocurrency | 11 | 27% |
| Financial Services | 6 | 15% |
| Web3 | 5 | 12% |
| FinTech | 5 | 12% |

39 industries tracked in total.

### Stage

| Stage | Investments | Share |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Seed | 17 | 41% |
| Series A | 11 | 27% |
| Funding Round | 6 | 15% |
| Pre-Seed | 3 | 7% |
| Series B | 1 | 2% |

6 stages tracked in total.

### Country

| Country | Investments | Share |
| --- | --- | --- |
| United States | 18 | 44% |
| Singapore | 3 | 7% |
| United Kingdom | 3 | 7% |
| Greece | 1 | 2% |
| Israel | 1 | 2% |

6 countries tracked in total.

## Team

| Name | Title | Investments | Profile |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Banafsheh Fathieh | General Partner | 14 | https://shizune.co/investors/profile/banafsheh-fathieh |
| Clara Boh | Deal Partner | 2 | https://shizune.co/investors/profile/clara-boh |
| Justin Barlow | Venture Partner | 8 | https://shizune.co/investors/profile/justin-barlow-7dba |
| Raymond Feng | Technical Partner | 0 | https://shizune.co/investors/profile/raymond-feng |
| Samuel Harrison | Managing Partner | 36 | https://shizune.co/investors/profile/samuel-harrison |

## Investments

| Company | Description | Amount | Stage | Date | Website |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Turnkey | Turnkey is an encryption service provider that offers secure APIs to manage private keys. | $30M | Series B | Jun 09, 2025 |  |
| OpenFX | OpenFX is redefining the future of global money movement. We enable money to flow across borders as effortlessly as data, unbound by time zones, legacy systems, or banking hours. Our FX infrastructure transforms how finance teams operate, delivering cross-border transfers with industry-leading spreads, real-time settlement and 24/7availability. We are a team of serial entrepreneurs from Affirm, BofA, Charles Schwab, Goldman Sachs, Intuit, JPM, Kraken, Microsoft, Meta, PayPal, and Slack. |  |  | May 22, 2025 |  |
| MagicBlock | MagicBlock Labs is a gaming and technology firm that creates infrastructure for fully on-chain games. | $7.5M | Seed | Apr 24, 2025 |  |
| Crossmint | Crossmint is the leading enterprise-grade developer platform to build onchain. Crossmint's suite of products includes wallets, tokenization, payments, and more; and powers 40,000+ companies and developers, including Fortune 500 companies and major brands like Mastercard, Adidas, Red Bull, Coinbase, Phantom, and more. |  |  | Mar 18, 2025 |  |
| Plume Network | Plume Networks develops built-in integrations, making it easy to deploy projects and capital on-chain. |  | Series A | Feb 05, 2025 |  |
| Rena Labs | Rena was creating the execution environment (TEE) abstraction Layer, designed to streamline deployment and execution workflows. This innovation aimed to enable a broad spectrum of verifiable AI use cases by providing a secure and efficient framework. Rena’s approach bridged the gap between advanced AI applications and the need for trusted, seamlessexecution, offering a foundation for reliability and scalability in AI-driven solutions. | $3.3M | Pre-Seed | Jan 09, 2025 |  |
| FLock.io | FLock enables decentralised and privacy-preserving machine learning, coordinated by smart contractsWe work to make user data collection obsolete, and widespread governance participation guaranteed by codewe propose to use distributed ledger technology (DLT) to achieve FLock, a secure and reliable decentralized {F}ederated {L}earning systembuilt on B{lock}chain.Or, in plain words, we build TensorFlow Federated (TFF) for Web 3.0 | $3M | Venture - Series Unknown | Dec 19, 2024 |  |
| Lens Protocol | Lens Protocol is a composable and decentralized social network serving the Web3 community. It enables creators to build their own web3 social media platforms and accounts, giving them control over their connections with their communities and also ownership over their content. | $31M | Venture - Series Unknown | Dec 18, 2024 |  |
| Plume Network | Plume Networks develops built-in integrations, making it easy to deploy projects and capital on-chain. | $20M | Series A | Dec 18, 2024 |  |
| Avara Ventures | Avara Ventures operates is an investment firm. |  |  | Dec 18, 2024 |  |

10 of 41 investments shown.

## Co-investors
- [Faction](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/faction-0d34) — VC Fund, 43 deals together
- [Wintermute Ventures](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/wintermute-ventures) — VC Fund, 9 deals together
- [Lightspeed Venture Partners](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/lightspeed-venture-partners) — VC Fund, 6 deals together
- [Bankless Ventures](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/bankless-ventures) — VC Fund, 5 deals together
- [Robot Ventures](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/robot-ventures) — VC Fund, 5 deals together
- [BH Digital](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/bh-digital) — VC Fund, 4 deals together

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## FAQ

### What does Faction invest in?

Faction invests primarily in Blockchain, Cryptocurrency and Financial Services startups, most often at Seed and Series A stage. Most of the 41 investments tracked by Shizune back companies in United States. The Investment Focus section breaks down every industry, stage and country in the portfolio.

### What is Faction's check size?

Faction typically joins rounds of $3.1M–$7.5M at Seed and $11M–$60M at Series A. These ranges are 10th–90th percentile round sizes calculated from confirmed public funding rounds, so they are a realistic guide to the rounds Faction participates in.

### How do I contact Faction?

Public channels for Faction include LinkedIn, X (Twitter) and the website linked on this profile. For a verified work email and phone number, create a free Shizune account — contact data is searched across 20+ sources and validated before delivery, so your outreach lands in the right inbox.

### Who are the partners at Faction?

The team at Faction includes Banafsheh Fathieh (General Partner), Clara Boh (Deal Partner) and Justin Barlow (Venture Partner), among 7 team members tracked by Shizune. The Team section lists each member with their title, investment count and links.

### Is Shizune's investor data accurate?

Yes — every stat on this profile is calculated from confirmed public funding rounds monitored across hundreds of sources since 2020. This profile was last refreshed in Aug 2026 and is updated monthly. Spotted something off? Use the “Suggest an edit” link near the top of the page.

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