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The Company That Turned Bitcoin Into a Ticker Symbol
21Shares spent seven years wrapping crypto in the plumbing of Wall Street - regulated, exchange-listed, boring on purpose. In October 2025, prime broker FalconX bought the whole thing.
The Firm That Publishes Its Homework
Cathie Wood built ARK Invest on a heresy in money management: tell everyone what you are buying, why, and when - then let them watch.
The Zurich Startup That Turned Bitcoin Into a Stock Ticker
Hany Rashwan and Ophelia Snyder built 21.co on a contrarian bet: that the fastest way to get crypto into a portfolio was not an app, but a boring ticker symbol your bank already knows how to buy.
Lucra
Lucra is a B2B competitive-loyalty platform that lets brands run live social competitions - tournaments, head-to-head challenges and mini-games - inside their own apps and websites through a white-label SDK. Originally launched in 2019 as a peer-to-peer real-money sports gaming app, the company pivoted to selling gamified engagement as a modern alternative to points-based loyalty programs, handling compliance, payments and fraud as a merchant of record. Its clients include Dave & Buster's, Five Iron Golf, TouchTunes and ChessKings, and in April 2026 it raised a $20M Series B led by ARK Invest's venture fund - ARK's first time leading an early-stage deal.
Dylan Robbins
Dylan Robbins is the founder and CEO of Lucra, a New York-based company that gives brands a white-label software kit for running peer-to-peer, real-money gaming and competitions inside their own apps. A former Goldman Sachs and AQR analyst with a Stanford MBA and a Duke undergraduate degree, Robbins started Lucra in 2019 with co-founder Michael Madding after the two spent years informally tracking sports wagers with friends. He pivoted the company from a consumer app to a B2B2C SDK in 2023, and in 2026 raised a $20M Series B led by ARK Invest - the fund's first lead investment in a non-AI startup.
Humata
Humata is an Austin-based AI company that lets people upload files and ask questions about them in plain English, returning answers with clickable citations that point back to the exact passage in the source document. Often described as 'ChatGPT for your files,' it targets professionals in legal, finance, healthcare, and research who need to extract insight from dense, unstructured documents without reading every page. Founded in 2022 by Cyrus Khajvandi and Dan Rasmuson, the company raised a $3.5M seed round in October 2023 led by Google's Gradient Ventures with participation from Cathie Wood's ARK Invest and M13.
Cyrus Khajvandi
Cyrus Khajvandi is the co-founder and CEO of Humata, an Austin-based AI startup often described as 'ChatGPT for all your files.' A Stanford biology graduate and serial entrepreneur, he built Humata after struggling to keep up with scientific papers, turning that personal frustration into a tool that lets people ask questions of their documents and get cited, fact-checkable answers. The company launched in early 2023, grew to millions of users processing tens of millions of pages, and raised $3.5M led by Google's Gradient Ventures with ARK Invest and M13.
Chris Burniske
Chris Burniske is a partner and co-founder of Placeholder, a venture capital firm that has invested in over 75 blockchain companies and networks since 2017. He co-authored the influential book 'Cryptoassets: The Innovative Investor's Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond' and led ARK Invest to become the first public fund manager to offer bitcoin exposure in 2015. Known for his unconventional approach - famously rolling up barefoot on a skateboard to pitch Cathie Wood - Burniske combines deep technical knowledge with a surfer's mentality toward finding uncrowded opportunities in crypto markets.