Valar Fund V

Valar Fund V is an early-stage venture capital fund managed by Valar Ventures, a firm founded in 2010 and based in New York City. The fund focuses on investing in technology companies, particularly in the fintech sector, with a global outlook. Valar Ventures, backed by Peter Thiel, aims to partner with entrepreneurs around the world, recognizing the potential for transformative technology startups to emerge outside of traditional hubs like Silicon Valley. The firm seeks to provide support and insight to founders, addressing their unique challenges and opportunities as they navigate the early stages of their businesses.

James Fitzgerald

Partner

Kobulnik Reuben

Operating Partner

Past deals in Banks

Neo Financial

Series C in 2022
Credit card, rewards, and deposits all in one.

Novo

Series B in 2022
Novo Platform Inc. is a modern banking platform that develops applications designed to integrate banking activities for businesses. Founded in 2016 and based in New York, the company provides users with tools to receive analytical insights and alerts related to fraudulent activities in their banking data. Novo partners with a network of FDIC-insured community banks, enabling it to offer banking products directly to consumers while emphasizing transparency and user experience. Initially focusing on depository banking products, Novo plans to expand into more profitable segments as it grows.

Neo Financial

Series B in 2021
Credit card, rewards, and deposits all in one.

Vauld

Series A in 2021
Hi there! if you’re reading this, you’re probably like us – have pretty much all your wealth stored in digitized (or soon to be digitized) assets like money in your bank, mutual funds, stocks or real estate. You probably have a financial advisor guiding you through your investments, a manager from your bank who helps you stay on top of your mortgage payments and a government that prints money responsibly to not de-value your lifetime of savings. But how do you know that the bank manager or your financial advisor has your best interests at heart instead of their own fee and commissions? Your contract explicitly states that they are not responsible for your loss even as they verbally assure you otherwise. How do you know that the digital assets won’t be hacked (traditional bank websites get hacked all the time)? Or that your physical assets won’t be stolen(bank robberies) or taken by fraud (enough examples in real estate)? Governments fall all the time, or change their monetary policies - and your currency today can literally have no value tomorrow (Indian demonetization, Argentina, Venezuela). How do you know it won’t happen to your country? Do you ask these questions? Well, we do all the time. To answer these questions and why we created the Bank of Hodlers, we have to dive into the details of how banking evolved. As early as the 2nd century BC, people who could save money started lending them out to people who could borrow and pay back with interest. Banking as an industry thrived in Italy and grew with the expansion of the Roman Empire. During the 20th century, developments in telecommunications and computing caused major changes to banks' operations and let banks dramatically increase in size and geographic spread. This consolidated the industry and gave the power to a few firms. Fast forward to 2007: their recklessness caused the financial crisis of 2007–2008 forcing failure of many banks, including some of the world's largest banks. The government let the banks live by infusing 1.2 trillion dollars of the taxpayer’s money into a handful of banks and in turn, created the need, wave of innovation and a community for blockchain and the concept of decentralization to thrive. Here’s Alan Greenspan (Chairman – Federal Reserve: 1987-2006), the guy who decided how much money to print in America, admitting that his model was flawed in 2008. Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5lZPWNFizQ In 2009, something magical happened, Satoshi Nakamoto released his white paper which removed the need for a centralized authority to facilitate transactions in a purely peer to peer and decentralized fashion and making truly beneficial for every user holding the currency. Some governments, after looking at the threat that bitcoin poses, have decided to take an anti-crypto stance. This ensures the network effect doesn’t happen at a scale where it replaces their national currency. This is where we come in. At the Bank of Hodlers, we intend to treat your cryptocurrencies as a separate asset class and offer services to ensure technologies based on blockchain are usable as of today, negating the need for the network effects and government acceptance to come in. We give every HODLer the ability to completely bank on blockchain today. Every once in a while, there’s a technology jump so large that completely leapfrogs every existing solution out there. Blockchain is this technology jump and the banks know this.

Novo

Series A in 2021
Novo Platform Inc. is a modern banking platform that develops applications designed to integrate banking activities for businesses. Founded in 2016 and based in New York, the company provides users with tools to receive analytical insights and alerts related to fraudulent activities in their banking data. Novo partners with a network of FDIC-insured community banks, enabling it to offer banking products directly to consumers while emphasizing transparency and user experience. Initially focusing on depository banking products, Novo plans to expand into more profitable segments as it grows.

Neo Financial

Series A in 2020
Credit card, rewards, and deposits all in one.

LoanStreet

Series A in 2018
LoanStreet Inc. operates an integrated, online platform that streamlines the process of sharing, managing, and originating loans for credit unions, banks, and direct lenders. It offers LoanStreet that provides access to a nationwide network of lenders and investors, track the performance of their loan portfolio, and more grow and diversify their balance sheet. The company’s LoanStreet provides real-time reporting, standardized agreements, balance sheet management, and automated reporting. The company was founded in 2013 and is based in New York, New York.

Deposit Solutions

Series B in 2016
Deposit Solutions is a developer of an open banking platform designed to connect banks and depositors across Europe. The company's platform help banks to offer attractive third party deposit products to their own customers through their existing accounts so that the depositors can access best-in-class deposit offers without having to open a new account at another bank, enabling banks looking for funding to gather deposits from new markets and client groups without having to set up and operate their own retail infrastructure.