In 2017, Bettina Warburg explained blockchain to a child. Then she explained it to a teenager, a college student, a graduate student and an expert. The WIRED exercise was a useful test. A technology promising to reorganize trade ought to survive a conversation with someone who has never traded a token. Before Warburg became half the name on Warburg Serres, she was already working on the gap between a large idea and an ordinary person’s understanding of it.
- Warburg Serres financed Web3 infrastructure and applications.
- Its Tomorrow Fund reports 63 funded projects.
- The fund now describes itself as being in realization mode.
That gap helps explain the investment firm. Founded by Warburg and Tom Serres in 2019, it put money into the machinery a decentralized economy would require. Data. Nodes. Wallets. Video processing. These are jobs, each with a potential customer and a bill attached. Reading the portfolio this way makes Web3 considerably easier to discuss over lunch.
First came the explanation
The partnership predates the fund. Warburg’s university-hosted CV dates Animal Ventures to 2015. By 2017, that business described itself as combining a venture studio with a technology consultancy. Its announced collaboration with the Blockchain Research Institute added research to the mix. The sequence matters: study a technological change, help companies understand it, then establish an investment vehicle around it.
Warburg’s background was in governance and diplomacy, including graduate study at Oxford. Her 2016 TED talk approached blockchain through economic institutions and uncertainty. Who is the other party? What happened to an asset? How do people coordinate? Those questions offer a more practical starting point than guessing which token will become fashionable next.
Animal Ventures and Warburg Serres created the Tomorrow Fund. The firm’s public positioning emphasized long horizons and political, societal and technological shifts. Its official portfolio stretches from underlying networks through middleware to applications. There is an organizing idea here: a new system needs several layers to function, and useful businesses may sit below the part everyone sees.
The plumbing has customers
Consider Coin Metrics. In May 2021, the crypto financial-intelligence company announced a $15 million Series B led by Goldman Sachs, with Warburg Serres among the new investors. Coin Metrics supplied network data, market data, indexes and risk tools to institutions. Its customers needed information they could use to evaluate an unfamiliar market. Selling reliable measurement is a concrete response to uncertainty.
A month later, Warburg Serres participated in Blockdaemon’s $28 million Series A, led by Greenspring Associates. Blockdaemon’s business involved the node infrastructure used to operate blockchain networks. The financing announcement described plans to expand services, hire staff and deepen institutional relationships. This is an enterprise technology problem: somebody must keep the underlying systems running while customers concentrate on their own businesses.
Livepeer supplies a third example. Warburg Serres joined its $20 million Series B extension in January 2022. Livepeer’s decentralized network handled video transcoding, the work of converting video into usable formats. Its proposed advantage depended on meeting a recognizable need at an attractive operating cost. The customer wanted video delivered; the technical architecture had to earn its place in that transaction.
Read the dollars carefully
The Tomorrow Fund’s first US securities notice makes the initial scale unusually concrete. It reported a $25 million offering, with $2.6 million sold to 14 investors, and a first sale dated November 14, 2019. That is a snapshot of fundraising at the time of filing. Treating the offering ceiling as a completed raise would change the meaning of the document.
The same care belongs in reading portfolio announcements. A $28 million Blockdaemon round is the amount raised from its financing syndicate. It is not Warburg Serres’s check. For readers comparing investment firms, that distinction prevents a familiar error: adding up other companies’ financing and calling the total an investor’s spending.
Entire financing rounds. These bars do not represent Warburg Serres’s individual investments or returns.
The business itself is fund investment management. It connects investor capital with founders and projects, rather than selling a consumer subscription. Its market position is a specialist one: understanding decentralized systems and the businesses built around them. Other crypto investors can be alternatives for a founder and colleagues in the same financing. Polychain, for example, led Foundation’s 2022 seed round, which Warburg Serres also joined.
A bridge is still a bridge
The infrastructure thesis has an uncomfortable test inside the portfolio. The Tomorrow Fund lists Nomad, a cross-chain communication project. On August 1, 2022, its token bridge was hacked. Nomad subsequently described more than $186 million taken. Its postmortem identified a message-authentication bug introduced through a contract upgrade. The machinery connecting networks had become the point of failure.
This matters because infrastructure can sound reassuringly solid. Software remains software. A bridge can be useful and still expose its users to catastrophic loss. Nomad’s incident demonstrates a limit of the thesis: financing a necessary layer does not establish that its implementation is safe. Security, maintenance and deployment decisions remain part of the product.
“We invested in Tomorrow”Warburg Serres
Tomorrow becomes a portfolio
The firm’s website now uses the past tense and calls the Tomorrow Fund “in realization mode today.” In fund language, realization concerns turning holdings into proceeds. The phrase changes how a founder should read the site. Its portfolio is evidence of an investment approach, rather than an invitation to assume that fresh capital is available.
There is something useful to copy without copying the investments. Begin with a task someone must perform. Identify who pays, what becomes easier and what happens when the system fails. The Warburg Serres portfolio supplies concrete examples of that exercise. It also supplies Nomad. Put both on the same page, and the promise of a new internet becomes a much more demanding business proposition.