Jane Street goes to Silicon Valley

Making bets on CoreWeave, Anthropic and the AI future

Hedge funds and trading firms investing in private companies is not a new phenomenon. Many large tech focused hedge funds like the Tiger Cubs invest around half their client assets in private tech companies, often start-ups.

Hedge funds have also been gotten into the digital assets wave. Marshall Wace’s XO Digital Fund made profits of hundreds of millions of dollars from participating in a private fund-raising round for the stablecoin issuer Circle. Brevan Howard’s multi-billion-dollar digital assets fund has been one of the most active at investing in stakes in crypto infrastructure firms.

Some of the largest investments have come from proprietary trading firms. DRW and to a lesser extent Jump Trading are the forefront of digital assets investing and market structure.

Citadel Securities is a firm that has traditionally shied away from this space despite having taken on crypto VC Paradigm as a shareholder in 2022. But late last year it led a $500m fund raising round valuing the digital …