The trouble with trust is that it often looks strongest just before somebody asks to see the records. A valuation grows. A room fills. A confident person explains why the usual questions can wait. Kate Laurence has spent much of her professional life thinking about the questions that should come next: who holds the assets, who can inspect the system, and what happens when its custodians disappoint?
Those questions connect two parts of her biography that might otherwise seem far apart. She grew up in Russia and moved to the United States in her late teens. She later worked at Gartner, close to the practical business of choosing, buying and financing enterprise technology. In 2018, she founded Bloccelerate VC. Blockchain offered a possible answer to a problem she had reasons to take personally.
Her chosen industry has supplied plenty of occasions to revisit that answer. Laurence has remained an advocate through fundraising winters, corporate failures and arguments over regulation. The interesting thing is the continuity of her concern. Beneath the changing vocabulary of crypto lies a fairly old demand: let the people whose money is involved see what is happening to it.
A childhood behind the investment thesis
Laurence has written directly about the link between her upbringing and her work. “I was born and raised in Russia.” In that account, she and her early Bloccelerate partner Sam Yilmaz, who grew up in Turkey, described arriving in the United States with an appreciation for transparency and accountability shaped by instability in their countries of origin.
It gives her interest in blockchain a particular texture. An institution can look permanent while the arrangements underneath it are fragile. A currency can be familiar without being dependable. These are uncomfortable ideas for anyone who would prefer the financial system to behave like the furniture: present, serviceable and rarely worthy of discussion.
Her professional ambition is to give people more control over money, assets and data. She uses the term self-sovereignty. The aspiration is specific: systems in which individuals can exercise ownership with less dependence on a gatekeeper’s discretion. That remains an ambition, with difficult technical and organizational work attached. In Laurence’s biography, its emotional logic is easy to follow.
The education you get near the buyer
Gartner put Laurence close to a different kind of skepticism: the enterprise buyer’s. She worked around technology strategy, startups and the investors financing them. Her public career history also includes mentoring at Alchemist Accelerator. This was an education in the distance between a promising product and an organization prepared to use it.
It is an unglamorous distance. New software arrives carrying a vision; a prospective customer has an existing system, a budget and colleagues who would rather avoid a migration. Understanding both sides is useful for an investor. A founder needs someone who can recognize the technical possibility and still ask what will make a buyer change a familiar routine.
There are small signs of Laurence’s temperament in the record of those years. Former colleagues described her curiosity and persistence. One recalled her initiative in seeking a move to the United Kingdom to develop her international sales experience. Her LinkedIn profile records several Gartner Winners Circle awards and an Eagle Award. The picture is of someone who cared about execution before she had a venture fund to explain.
Her studies ran alongside that commercial career. Public education profiles list business administration at the University of Florida and a master’s in international relations and affairs at Harvard. Technology, institutions and cross-border experience were already sharing space in her working life. Blockchain gave those interests a common project.
First, try the machinery
In a 2021 conversation, Laurence recalled moving from London to Silicon Valley, attending Ethereum meetups and trying crypto mining. These experiments were part of learning how the technology worked. She later described hands-on experimentation as a useful preparation for investing.
There is something pleasantly practical about the sequence. A financial thesis can become elegant at a safe distance from the product. Trying the machinery invites inconvenience into the argument. The exercise suits a person whose career has involved translating between technology’s promises and the people expected to buy them.
“I personally found that experimenting with technology before investing in it is very helpful.”
Kate Laurence, 2021
A first fund, with the numbers attached
Bloccelerate’s first fund closed at $12 million in 2020. Forty-five limited partners supplied the capital, including family offices, wealthy individuals and a corporate investor. The firm planned early investments of roughly $500,000 to $2 million. Its existing investments included BlockApps, Symbiont and MakerDAO, a combination spanning enterprise software and digital finance.
At that stage, the firm’s enterprise interest was visible in the uses it discussed: supply-chain records, shared information and capital markets. Laurence also made a local argument for Seattle, pointing to the region’s talent relative to available capital. Her investment outlook extended beyond the city; the first fund’s planned geography included North America and Europe.
2020
September 2022
The second fund’s reported target was $100 million. A target describes the intended destination; the reported raise records progress at that date.
The distinction matters because a venture firm’s own business needs customers too. Its limited partners have to be persuaded that a team can find opportunities, assess them and help companies develop. Laurence was selling a method as well as a market. The fund combined financing with practical support, drawing on mentors, operators and technology relationships.
When the trust argument met FTX
In November 2022, the collapse of FTX made every confident claim about crypto harder to deliver. Laurence’s response was pointed. She argued that a centralized company had operated without the transparency and oversight the industry claimed to value. At that time, she said Bloccelerate had no exposure to FTX or its affiliated companies.
Her response also described the firm’s interests in compliance, security, audits, treasury management and enterprise adoption. These are useful subjects to remember when a market becomes enchanted with a new asset. Someone still has to establish what happened, what belongs to whom and whether the accounts deserve confidence.
“But this too shall pass,” she said. The phrase expressed an investor’s conviction under pressure. Its credibility rested on what would follow: better controls, more scrutiny and companies capable of doing useful work. Laurence’s argument asked people to judge the underlying systems while examining the conduct of the people operating businesses around them.
The episode gives her origin story an uncomfortable echo. A career concerned with institutional trust had led her into an industry confronting its own failures of governance. Remaining there meant continuing to argue for the possibility of better arrangements while acknowledging the damage already done. Conviction acquired an obligation to answer questions.
The useful art of an awkward conversation
That obligation extends to policy. After a Bloomberg appearance in 2023, Laurence wrote about the speed with which sentiment in the United States had moved from enthusiasm toward rejection. She acknowledged that the industry bore responsibility for allowing euphoria to run ahead of restraint, while arguing that enforcement actions could damage innovation.
It is a difficult position to occupy in public. Founders want workable rules; their critics want evidence that promises can be enforced. Laurence’s career increasingly includes the work of bringing these groups into contact. Her 2025 Mission Matters appearance returned to building a venture fund, early skepticism and the networks that help founders progress.
The BCVC Founder Summit gives that connecting role a physical form. The 2024 program placed her in the moderator’s chair for a Bitcoin-versus-Ethereum debate. Her recap of the fourth annual gathering in 2025 described builders, regulators, investors and policymakers discussing crypto, artificial intelligence and capital markets. The guest list included former CFTC chair J. Christopher Giancarlo.
There is a logic to the gathering beyond a pleasingly full calendar. A financial system involves people with different responsibilities. Builders can describe what is possible. Investors ask what can become a business. Institutions bring requirements a demonstration may overlook. Regulators bring questions that persist after the presentation ends. Putting them together makes disagreement available for inspection.
Still asking who can check
Her public work continued in 2026. She was listed for the Milken Institute’s March discussion of fintech leadership and the April Eve Wealth Summit panel on funding the future. As of October 21, she is also on the speaker roster for The Bridge conference in New York on October 27. The settings reflect her continuing position between early companies and established finance.
Bloccelerate’s current team lists Laurence as CEO and general partner, alongside general partner Theo Fields; Yilmaz is chairman emeritus. The firm continues to describe a research-driven approach and close support for founders. Laurence’s job combines choosing investments with maintaining the relationships that might help them become working businesses.
The recurring question in her story is simple enough to survive a change of terminology. Who can check? It reaches from a childhood shaped by institutional uncertainty to the enterprise buyer’s diligence and the fund investor’s scrutiny. Laurence has chosen a technology with ambitious answers. Her more durable contribution may be the insistence that the question stays in the room.