Runway Fund — an emergency reduction fund assembled by the co-founders of OnChain Capital to assist startups impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic — h
Runway Fund — an emergency reduction fund assembled by the co-founders of OnChain Capital to assist startups impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic — has been “overwhelmed” by the variety of functions.
Cointelegraph spoke to Ran Neuner, host of CNBC Africa’s Crypto Dealer and co-founder of each OnChain Capital and Runway Fund, to seek out out extra concerning the challenge’s plans to help struggling start-ups.
The fund is open to functions from startups in all jurisdictions and has obtained 400 submissions from startups worldwide in solely two weeks.
Neuner states that the fund has obtained “extra requests than we ever may have imagined,” including that Runway’s employees is “working 20 hours a day throughout completely different time zones to evaluation each software.”
“Sadly, the variety of affected startups is big, way more than we anticipated,” Ran states, including, “We’re within the last phases of [due diligence] with three firms already and hope to make the primary investments by early subsequent week.”
Runway Fund hopes to lift $100 million
The fund was launched with $10 million in funds offered by Neuner, OnChain’s different co-founder Yossi Hasson, and contributions from “excessive web value people.”
The fund intends to hunt out an extra $90 million from OnChain Capital’s investor community sooner or later:
“We confronted a dilemma as as to whether we must always elevate cash first or launch the fund. We opted to get going as rapidly as potential after which proceed elevating based mostly on the response. Evidently, we are going to now exit and lift extra capital […] We’ve got had a number of curiosity from potential traders.”
Ran Neuner “notably impressed” by African startups
Whereas Neuner notes that the standard of all the startups which have utilized to the fund is “mind-blowing,” he states that African candidates have stood out above the remainder.
“I’ve been notably impressed by the African Entrepreneurs, they’ve very novel companies and the caliber of the groups has been spectacular,” he states, including, ”I didn’t think about that Africa could be thus far forward, despite the fact that I’m from Africa.”