September 2022. The NFT cycle had peaked, the macro had turned, and most web3 funds were pivoting to "AI" or quietly closing. We launched anyway.
The thesis was specific: on-chain, self-custodian, ETH-heavy. No leverage, no illiquid bags we couldn't exit, no "we'll figure out custody later." A Luxembourg SCSp AIF structure — wagmi web3 Fund I — so LPs got real reporting and we got real governance. Six partners. Six signatures on every material decision.
A fund that actually held what it said it held. Every position on-chain, every wallet verifiable, NAV reconciled to the block. Exposure concentrated in ETH and quality L1/L2 infrastructure, with small sleeves for DeFi bluechips, select NFTs, and metaverse land.
The best call in the book: overweighting ETH and refusing to rotate into BTC when the consensus trade was "BTC dominance up." Captured most of the +60% Q2 upside on the right side of that call.
Three years. $100 → $173.30 per unit. +73.31% total return. 21.10% CAGR. Max drawdown of -22.60% during the 2023 grind — painful but survivable, which was the whole point of the structure.
AUM at close: $1.64M. Not a generational fund. But every LP got back more than they put in, audited and on-chain, through a cycle that killed most of our peers. That's the bar.
Summer 2025. Prices at new highs. MiCA compliance overhead about to change the math for a small AIF like ours. The rational move was to return capital at the top and build the next vehicle clean, rather than grind through a regulatory transition that would've eaten returns.
Closed by choice, at the high. A successor vehicle — post-MiCA, scaled structure — is the forward-looking work. WAGMI I did what it was supposed to do.
AI compute demand is on track to 3× US data-center power draw by 2030. The grid was not built for this, and nobody is building enough grid fast enough. Natural gas turbines have multi-year lead times. Utility-scale solar + storage can't do 24/7 baseload without multiplying the capex.
Nuclear is the only physics-true answer: high density, low land, zero carbon, baseload. But legacy LWRs are 10-year permits and $10B+ overnight costs. The window opens for a new form factor — small, modular, inherently safe, factory-built — aimed directly at the hyperscaler load curve.
This is not a policy bet. This is a physics and supply-chain bet with a policy tailwind.
A molten-salt reactor using thorium fuel, designed walk-away safe: fuel is liquid at operating temp, drain plug fails passively, no high-pressure vessel, no water-cooling catastrophe path. The physics cannot run away.
Target unit: ~100 MWe modules, factory-assembled, truck-shippable, sited at or adjacent to hyperscale campuses. Co-located heat offtake for direct-to-chip cooling and on-site hydrogen. One module anchors a ~75 MW AI cluster; stack modules for gigawatt campuses.
Three things aligned: NRC Part 53 (risk-informed licensing for advanced reactors) is finally workable. DoE HALEU supply plus thorium breeder economics make fuel accessible. And the hyperscalers are actively signing PPAs — Microsoft, Amazon, Google have all telegraphed nuclear offtake in the last 12 months. The demand is not hypothetical.
NGMI is in this round because we bring operator DNA to an infra thesis — 14 years of building capital-intensive physical businesses that have to actually work when customers show up. We're not index-buying the SMR basket. We're picking one team, one fuel cycle, one regulatory path.
$75M Series A at $400–500M pre-money. NGMI participates as an investor in the round. Proceeds: core team build, NRC pre-app, HALEU + thorium fuel sourcing, first-module fabrication partnership, anchor-customer LOI pipeline.
Exit path is strategic acquisition by a hyperscaler, IPO on commercial operations, or continued private rounds to $20B+ valuation by first grid-tie. Base case is 587–734× on the entry round over a 10-year horizon. That's the math if the team executes.