Imagine you’re standing in an empty field. A group of city planners walks up, unrolls a giant blueprint, and points to a spot. “Right here,” one says, “we’re going to build the main water pipe for a city that doesn’t exist yet.” It sounds a little crazy. Why spend a fortune on plumbing before a single house is built? But that’s exactly what’s happening in the world of crypto, where some very smart people are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on the digital pipes and power grids for the internet of tomorrow.
The Short Version
- Entrée Capital raised a new $300 million infrastructure fund.
- Focus is on funding AI agents and Decentralized Physical Infrastructure (DePIN).
- The firm previously backed major fintechs like Stripe and Rapyd.
A company called Entrée Capital just announced it has gathered a new $300 million fund for this very purpose. Now, a “fund” is just a big pool of money, collected from wealthy investors and institutions. The people who run the fund act like talent scouts, searching for brand-new, often tiny, companies that they believe could one day become the next Google or Amazon. They give these young companies money to get started, hoping for a big payoff years down the road.
Entrée Capital isn’t looking for the next hot digital coin you see on the news. They’re investing in something far less glamorous but much more important: infrastructure. They’re funding the builders of the digital roads, bridges, and power plants that will be needed for the next version of the internet, often called Web3, to actually work for millions of people.
They plan to give this money to companies in their earliest stages, from the “back-of-the-napkin” idea phase to the point where they have a small, working product. It’s the riskiest time to invest, but it’s also where the biggest breakthroughs happen.
The Robot Butler for Your Money
So, what kind of digital plumbing are they buying? One of the main targets is something called “AI agents.” It sounds like something from a science fiction movie, but the idea is surprisingly simple.
Imagine you had a personal robot assistant just for your finances. You could give it a set of very specific, unbreakable rules. For example: “Every time my bank account goes over $5,000, take the extra money and buy a little bit of gold. If my emergency fund ever drops below $1,000, sell some of that gold to top it back up. And never, ever touch the money set aside for my daughter’s college fund.”
Once you set these rules, the AI agent would follow them perfectly, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It wouldn’t get emotional during a market crash or greedy during a boom. It would just execute your plan. These rules are locked in using cryptography, the same technology that secures digital money, making them incredibly difficult for anyone to tamper with.
Big investors are excited about this because it could automate incredibly complex jobs that currently require teams of expensive human experts. It’s a way to manage assets securely and automatically, and Entrée Capital wants to fund the companies building these digital butlers.
Building a Neighborhood-Owned Power Company
The other area they’re focused on is even more ambitious. It’s called Decentralized Physical Infrastructure, or DePIN for short. It’s a mouthful, but the concept is about changing who owns the essential services we use every day.
Let’s use Wi-Fi as an example. Right now, you probably pay a big company like Comcast or Verizon for your internet. They own all the cables and equipment, and you pay them a monthly fee to use it. DePIN asks a different question: What if a neighborhood could create its own internet service?
Imagine you and a hundred of your neighbors all bought a special Wi-Fi router. Together, these routers create a powerful, shared network covering your entire area. For every bit of data you help share with others, you earn a small payment in the form of a digital token. It’s like a community-owned utility, where the users are also the owners and operators.
This idea isn’t limited to Wi-Fi. It could be used for almost anything physical. Think of a network of community-owned solar panels, where people who generate extra power can sell it directly to their neighbors. Or a network of data storage, where instead of paying Amazon for cloud space, you pay thousands of people to rent out tiny, unused slices of their computer hard drives.
This is what gets big investors excited. It’s a crypto idea that breaks out of the computer and into the real world. It’s a way to build and finance massive infrastructure projects, from energy grids to mapping services, from the ground up, with the community as the owner.
Why Does This Matter Now?
These two ideas, AI agents and DePIN, are the crypto world’s answer to two of the biggest trends in technology today: artificial intelligence and cloud computing. Big companies are pouring billions into AI, and Amazon’s cloud business is one of the most profitable enterprises on Earth. Investors at Entrée Capital see a parallel path being built with crypto technology.
They believe that just as AI is changing software, these automated “AI agents” will change how we manage money and other digital goods. And just as cloud computing changed how we store information, DePIN could change how we build and pay for real-world services.
This isn’t Entrée Capital’s first rodeo, either. The firm was an early investor in huge financial technology companies like Stripe and Rapyd. They have a history of understanding how money and technology mix, both in the traditional banking world and in the new world of crypto. Their bet is that the future will be a blend of both.
For most of us, this news won’t change anything tomorrow. You can’t go out and buy a DePIN solar panel at the store yet. But this $300 million investment is a strong signal. It shows that even when the price of digital coins is going up and down, serious builders are quietly laying the foundation for a very different kind of internet, one that’s more automated, more secure, and owned by its users.
