Katie Haun has made a career out of timing. A former federal prosecutor who pivoted to crypto just as Andreessen Horowitz was ramping up its blockchain bets, she left a16z four years ago to strike out on her own—and pulled in $1.5 billion for her debut fund within weeks. Now she's back with another round of outside capital, and this time the thesis has evolved.
On May 4, Haun Ventures closed $1 billion in fresh commitments for Fund II, split evenly between an early-stage vehicle and a later-stage acceleration fund, according to Bloomberg. The money will be deployed over the next two to three years, the firm said, targeting three areas: the nuts and bolts of financial infrastructure, the tokenization of real-world assets, and—most notably—what Haun calls the "agentic economy," where artificial intelligence agents will soon be paying for services, subscribing to platforms, and transacting on behalf of humans.
That last category marks new territory for Haun, who has spent much of her post-government career focused on blockchain rails and crypto networks. But the premise is straightforward enough: if AI agents are going to function as autonomous economic actors, they'll need native infrastructure for fraud prevention, credit, insurance, identity, privacy, and reputation systems. In other words, the financial plumbing needs to be rebuilt from scratch.
A Familiar Playbook, a New Wrinkle
The $1 billion figure, split 50-50 between the two funds, brings Haun Ventures' total assets under management to an estimated $2.5 billion, according to a PitchBook estimate cited by TechCrunch on May 4. Bloomberg confirmed the structure and noted that Cooley LLP advised on the close. Limited partners include the usual institutional suspects—sovereign wealth funds, endowments, foundations, pensions, financial institutions—though Haun's team declined to name specific backers. (That's standard practice in venture capital, where LPs often prefer to avoid the spotlight.)
This is Fund II. The first one, announced in March 2022, totaled $1.5 billion: $500 million for early-stage bets, $1 billion for acceleration rounds. Haun launched the firm shortly after leaving a16z, where she'd been a general partner focused on crypto. The timing was fortuitous—or perhaps calculated. She raised that inaugural fund just as crypto was reaching a speculative peak, and while the subsequent downturn rattled many believers, institutional appetite for blockchain infrastructure never fully evaporated.
The new capital suggests that appetite is holding steady, maybe even growing. One day after Haun's close, a16z announced its own $2.2 billion crypto Fund Five, a signal that large pools of money remain committed to the sector despite the bruising volatility of previous cycles.
Three Theses, One Common Thread
In a May 4 blog post announcing Fund II, Haun laid out the investment framework. First: "the new financial infrastructure." That's a catch-all for payments, banking, capital markets, custody, and foreign exchange—all of it rebuilt for a digital, always-on global economy. Second: tokenization, or moving real-world assets on-chain. Think currencies, securities, derivatives, commodities like gold and oil. Third: the agentic economy, where AI agents transact autonomously and need the rails to do it safely.
The AI bet is the newest wrinkle. Until now, Haun's portfolio has leaned heavily on blockchain-native companies—exchanges, custody providers, settlement layers, consumer crypto networks. The agentic thesis broadens that aperture. The logic goes something like this: as AI agents begin to act as independent economic players, they'll need tools for verification, reputation, and fraud prevention that don't exist yet. And because those tools will need to operate at scale, across borders, with programmable logic baked in, blockchain infrastructure becomes the obvious foundation.
Whether that thesis pans out is anyone's guess. The market for AI agent payments is still nascent. Noah Levine, a partner at a16z, estimated in March that 30-day payment volume for AI agents was somewhere around $1.6 million after filtering out wash trades—real money, but hardly a tidal wave. Still, the trajectory matters more than the current numbers. If agents become a standard feature of how businesses and consumers operate online, the demand for agentic infrastructure could scale quickly.
What's in the Portfolio
Haun's current holdings, as listed on the firm's website in May, span all three investment areas. On the financial infrastructure side: Erebor, a bank targeting the tokenization and stablecoin economy that raised $350 million at a $4.35 billion valuation in late 2025. Also Fireblocks and Chainalysis, both confirmed investments during a May 2024 update, plus BVNK and Bridge, which focus on payments and tokenized asset infrastructure.
For tokenization: Plume, Superstate (tokenized funds and treasuries), and The Clearing Company, which handles settlement. On the agentic front: Guardrail, a startup building safety and control systems for AI agents. The portfolio also includes Ellipsis Labs, which operates the Phoenix decentralized exchange and is building the Atlas chain for what it calls "verifiable finance." Consumer-facing bets like Farcaster and Zora round out the mix, alongside infrastructure names like Aptos Labs, Conduit, Helius, and Sovereign Labs.
It's a sprawling list, though perhaps less eclectic than it appears. Nearly every company touches some combination of digital assets, programmable money, or decentralized networks. The agentic economy thesis, in that sense, isn't a departure—it's an expansion of the same core belief that financial systems will be rebuilt on transparent, programmable infrastructure.
The Macro Backdrop
Context matters. Haun is raising this fund at a moment when venture capital is flush—Crunchbase reported in early April that global VC hit a record $300 billion in Q1 2026, with AI startups capturing 80 percent of the total. That's an extraordinary concentration, and it reflects the frenzy around generative AI and, more recently, agentic systems.
At the same time, traditional financial infrastructure is under pressure. BCG projected last September that global payments revenue would reach $2.4 trillion by 2029, driven in part by agentic AI and digital currencies. Haun's bet is that the intersection of those two forces—AI agents needing to transact, and tokenized assets enabling programmable money—will create demand for an entirely new layer of financial plumbing. If she's right, the companies building that plumbing early will have a structural advantage.
If she's wrong, well, she won't be the first venture capitalist to overestimate how quickly the future arrives.
The Team
Haun isn't doing this alone. The firm's leadership includes General Partner Diogo Mónica, Partners Chris Ahn and Breck Stodghill, CFO Kevin Bissell, Head of Investor Relations Suzanne Kim, and General Counsel James Rathmell, who testified before Congress on tokenization in May 2025. It's a small but experienced group, and the flat structure reflects Haun's belief that venture firms work best when decision-making authority is concentrated.
Fortune reported in March 2025 that Haun was targeting $1 billion for two new funds. The May close hit that mark exactly—a rare outcome in venture fundraising, where targets often shift as LPs commit or demur. Whether the capital was easy or hard to raise, Haun isn't saying. But the speed of the close suggests the pitch landed.
Now comes the harder part: deploying it.
