Jake Brukhman’s father taught him to code on a Sun workstation when he was fourteen. It is a useful beginning for an investor’s biography: a young person learning that a computer can be instructed, rather than merely admired. Years later, Brukhman would build a business around systems whose participants could do more than watch. They could contribute, own a stake and help determine what happened next.
Today he is the founder, CEO and managing partner of CoinFund, based in Miami and investing in decentralized networks. His interests stretch from blockchain infrastructure to artificial intelligence. Yet the thread running through his career is surprisingly consistent. He keeps returning to the question of how people enter a system, what they do once they arrive, and where the resulting value goes.
There is also an easel somewhere in this account. Brukhman has described acrylic painting as a favorite activity outside work and identified himself as a published poet. An investment committee could do worse than include someone who has had to decide whether a blank canvas needs another mark.
A programmer arrives at the investment table
Brukhman was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, to two computer scientists. His family came to the United States in 1990. In his public account of the move, he remembers his parents selling almost everything they owned and arriving at JFK with about $400. He connects that family history to a belief that technology should lower the barriers to opportunity, including economic opportunity.
The education that followed was technical. He studied mathematics and computer science at Rutgers, spent time at University College London, and studied at NYU’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. Those institutions appear in his current professional biography alongside an unusually mixed set of jobs: financial technology, product management, engineering and private-company research.
At Highbridge Capital Management, he worked in financial technology. At Amazon, he was a technical product manager and engineer. At Triton Research, he became a partner and chief technology officer. Triton gathered public information about private companies and used it for financial analysis before those companies went public. The work sat at a meeting point familiar to him: software on one side, an investment question on the other.
That combination matters to the story. The future founder of CoinFund had experience making technology work and examining what a business might be worth. Blockchain would give him a subject that required both. It also complicated the second task. A network could be valuable without resembling the private company an investor was accustomed to studying.
Bitcoin came first. Ethereum changed the question.
Brukhman was introduced to Bitcoin in 2011 and bought it in mid-2013. His interest deepened after reading the Ethereum white paper. The idea that captured him was that digital tokens could represent early economic interests in decentralized networks. Bitcoin had already become something people treated as an investment. He began asking how that reasoning might apply to other networks.
The distinction sounds abstract until money enters the conversation. If a useful service runs across a public network, an investor needs to understand how that service creates value and who receives it. Buying shares in a company is one familiar answer. Tokens, network participation and the relationship between a company and its protocol introduce other possibilities, each with its own questions.
CoinFund emerged from a Slack channel where a small group researched crypto and investing. It formalized in July 2015, with beginnings at a Brooklyn kitchen table. This was a business assembled around investigation: people learning about an unfamiliar technology together, then deciding that their research could support an investment firm.
Alex Felix joined the developing firm after a career in traditional finance. He and Brukhman met about a year after CoinFund’s founding. Felix, too, had been struck by Ethereum’s possibilities. Their backgrounds gave the partnership two ways into the same problem: understanding the machinery and understanding the economics.
An investment with a job attached
By 2018, Brukhman was championing an approach called generalized mining. The phrase extends the idea of earning through work done for a network beyond the conventional picture of machines mining cryptocurrency. It asks what a network needs from its participants, and how supplying that need can become part of an investment approach.
He put the underlying conviction plainly: “the best way to invest in a network is to be part of it.” An investor following that approach has practical questions to answer. How does the network function? What work supports it? What incentives keep participants involved? A purchase alone cannot answer all of them.
His public talks and discussions took that idea into the company of other investors and builders. At Prague Blockchain Week in 2018, a panel with investors including Kyle Samani and Max Mersch examined the role of crypto funds. CoinFund also hosted Brooklyn discussions under the Rabbithole Talks name. The subjects included technical development and the economics of open-source software.
“You can’t get away with being just signal.”Jake Brukhman, 2021
That remark captures the operational demand behind the philosophy. A network’s reputation may attract attention, but somebody still has to make it useful. For a founder, an investor’s contribution becomes a question that can be tested in daily work. Expertise has to survive contact with the project.
The canvas beside the code
Brukhman’s interest in digital art fits into this career without requiring a costume change. On his personal website, he describes moving among technology projects, art and writing in his spare time. He founded First Edition, an online gallery supporting artists who work with blockchain-based digital creations.
Art offers a particularly direct way to encounter digital ownership. A work can be seen on a screen by many people. The questions of who made it, who owns a token associated with it and how a creator earns from it are separate questions. A gallery places those ideas in front of people who may have little interest in the mechanics of a blockchain.
His own creative work gives the subject a personal dimension. Painting demands decisions about form and attention; poetry demands decisions about language. Neither appears in his biography as an investment performance claim. They are activities he has chosen to name when describing himself, and they make the person behind the technical thesis easier to picture.
There is a pleasing incongruity in the reading list, too. In a 2019 Q&A, he named John C. Hull’s Options, Futures, and Other Derivatives as a favorite business book. The published poet had room for a derivatives textbook. Anyone trying to place him neatly on either side of the arts-and-mathematics divide would need a wider shelf.
A kitchen table acquires institutional company
In July 2023, CoinFund announced the close of its $158 million Seed IV fund. It had initially sought $125 million. The fund was intended for pre-seed and seed investments, with backing from institutional investors, family offices and wealthy individuals. By then the organization had moved well beyond its original research circle.
The timing gives the number its context. Crypto had endured a series of collapses, and venture investment in the sector had fallen for five consecutive quarters. CoinFund’s new fund arrived amid that retreat. Raising capital in such conditions was a concrete test of whether investors would continue supporting the firm’s approach.
Brukhman’s language about difficult markets can be mischievous. “A lot of people say bloodbath, but I say opportunity bath,” he said in a podcast conversation. The joke communicates his long view, though it does not supply a forecast. His career has been built around investigating what developers might make during periods when attention and prices are moving elsewhere.
Who gets to build the next model?
Artificial intelligence gives that approach a new subject. In September 2022, Brukhman and Rishin Sharma published an essay examining the intersection of AI and web3. They organized the problem around three bottlenecks: data, compute and monetization. Their argument was that public networks could help coordinate contributions and give participants an economic interest in shared work.
By June 2024, he was reporting from the SuperAI conference in Singapore on the meeting of conventional AI developers and teams working with decentralized systems. He welcomed the opportunity for the two groups to engage. The subject required people with different technical assumptions to examine the same problems.
In March 2025, his investment essay on Pluralis made the economic question more specific. Pluralis was developing Protocol Learning, an approach to training models across distributed resources. Its proposal included splitting a model among participants so that no subset could independently extract the complete model. Brukhman’s interest was in how that architecture might support a business around shared access.
He framed the outcome conditionally. If successful, the approach could broaden participation in producing and using AI. That qualification belongs in the story: an investment thesis is an argument about a possibility. Distributed training presents technical difficulties, and a promising design still has to work. His current areas of interest also include agentic services and payments, tokenization and quantum blockchains.
And then there was the matcha
A smaller episode brings the story back to Miami. Charlotte Siller, now CoinFund’s head of marketing and communications, recalled a meeting with Brukhman in an account published in September 2026. She remembered his description of reading the Ethereum white paper and staring at the wall for thirty minutes afterward. She also remembered explaining her own ideas so intensely that she never touched her matcha.
As they left, Brukhman noticed the untouched drink. In a career populated by protocols, training methods and fund announcements, it is a welcome detail: two people talking, one of them getting carried away, the other keeping an eye on the table.
The conversation concerned the future of the firm and the builders it might support. CoinFund had begun with people gathering to work something out. More than a decade later, its founder was still at a table, listening to someone describe what they wanted to build.