When Val Vavilov cofounded his Bitcoin mining company, Bitfury, in 2011, the original cryptocurrency was worth less than $30, a sliver of its roughly $91,000 price today. Since then, Bitfury’s mining ventures spun off into two Nasdaq-listed companies whose combined worth tops $9 billion, while also launching two companies that offer AI infrastructure. Bitfury’s next step? It wants to use its money to invest in the next crop of ethical tech innovators.
The company announced on Tuesday that it would launch a $1 billion investment initiative, where it aims to support mission-driven founders. It aims to spend $200 million in the next year and the rest of the fund in the next several years.
“We were ourselves mission-driven entrepreneurs that embraced Bitcoin, and we brought the power of Bitcoin to the world,” said George Kikvadze, the executive vice chairman, in an interview with Fortune. “Now we want to take our winnings and enable others to go and win and make the world a better place.”
Bitfury is not the first company to invest in both crypto and AI. Major tech companies like Google, Apple, and X—all racing for superiority in AI—are exploring blockchain technology, as President Donald Trump’s administration has loosened regulation of the crypto sector.
Bitfury says it doesn’t have an exact list yet of the companies it hopes to invest in. However, it plans to invest in ethical companies involved in AI, quantum computing, and transparent decentralized systems, among other categories.
It also aims to invest in self-sovereign identity, which is a way for people to have complete control of their own data using cryptography. Vavilov, Bitfury’s CEO, says that this technology will be important as AI avatars become universal, and it becomes ever more difficult to determine who is real and who is fake. Kikvadze added that this might not be the reality for 20 or 30 years, but he stressed the importance of looking far into the future when investing in technology.
“We’re big fans of [the American architect] Buckminster Fuller, who said, ‘You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model completely obsolete,’” Kikvadze said.
Bitfury made a majority of its money through its mining operations, which include its two spun-off companies, both listed on the Nasdaq. Cipher Mining (CIFR) began operations in the U.S. and is worth about $5.5 billion, and Hut8 (HUT) began in Canada and has a market cap of about $4 billion. Bitfury also established and cofounded two companies that offer AI infrastructure, LiquidStack and Axelera AI, respectively. The former cools data centers, and the latter designs AI software and hardware.
Vavilov said his company is pivoting into this investment fund because of the recent convergence of AI and crypto.
“Why now? Because AI is taking over, and we see the big synergy between AI and decentralized systems,” he said. “We believe that the future will be a combination of AI and decentralized systems working together, and we have huge experience in the crypto space and in AI.”
