Tether, the issuer of the USDT stablecoin, is planning to invest a staggering $1 billion in technologies such as biotech, financial infrastructure, and artificial intelligence (AI).
Tether has already spent around $2 billion through its VC arm on technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and alternative financial infrastructure.
Tether Plans Significant Investment
According to Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino, the company will invest at least $1 billion through its VC arm. Ardoino stated that Tether has a growing team that evaluates hundreds of pitches on a monthly basis. Over the past couple of years, Tether has already spent $2 billion on technologies such as AI.
“Tether Investments has a growing team of 15 people who are evaluating as many as hundreds of pitches each month, most of them coming directly from startups. It’s focused on alternative financial infrastructure for emerging markets, artificial intelligence, and biotech — areas where it has already spent about $2 billion over the past two years.”
Ardoino added that Tether had already invested $1 billion in AI, including backing Northern Data Group with a $610 million debt financing facility announced in 2023.
“We can offer AI computing to all the companies we have invested in. It’s all about investing in technology that helps with disintermediation with traditional finance. Less reliance on the Big Tech companies like Google, Amazon and Microsoft.”
Record Profits for Tether
Ardoino’s comments on Tether’s VC ambitions come shortly after the company announced a record net profit of $4.52 billion during the first quarter of 2024. A significant chunk of these profits, around $3.52 billion, came from the gains Tether made on its Bitcoin and gold holdings. The remaining $1 billion were made from operating profits derived from the United States Treasury Holdings.
Only Investing In Interesting Projects
Ardoino added that Tether gets hundreds of deals per month, and completes only a tiny percentage of those deals. He further said that Tether does not require companies to reach a specific target when it comes to profitability after it invests in companies. Instead, Ardoino stated that Tether only invests in projects that it finds interesting.
“You can imagine that the news that Tether is making good money went around the world. We get tens or hundreds of deals per month that are on the table, and we only end up doing a very small percentage of that. Our investment policy is investing only in projects we find extremely interesting. We are not a classic VC. We do invest in things that we care about, and we have our own strategy.”
Tether is one of the biggest companies in the crypto ecosystem and is the issuer of USDT, the largest stablecoin in the market. Tether’s planned investment comes a few months after the company restructured its business into new divisions. The new divisions include Tether Data, Tether Power, Tether Finance, Tether Evo, and Tether Edu. Tether has also been investing in Bitcoin mining and announced a $150 million investment in crypto mining firm Bitdeer in May.
Disclaimer: This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.
