2 weeks Ago By Monica Younsoo Chung
The realm of venture capital funding has experienced a seismic shift, with Web3 venture capital investment plummeting by 74% year-over-year, while artificial intelligence(AI) startups garnered over $100 billion in 2024, commanding an impressive 46% of total VC funding. For founders in the Web3 space, the challenges of securing financing have never been more daunting—venture capitalists are retreating, accelerators demand equity stakes, and predatory funds tempt startups with short-term arrangements, often offloading tokens to retail investors at the earliest opportunity. In response to this pressing issue, Louis Dharma, Co-founder of Nozomi Network, underscores the urgency of the situation.
To support Web3 innovators, Nozomi is launching with a substantial $100 million in aligned capital and debuting the first open-source, Y Combinator-style accelerator tailored specifically for the Web3 ecosystem. In a recent discussion with Korea IT Times, Louis Dharma explored the stark contrast between the flourishing funding for AI and the struggles faced by Web3 founders. The conversation delved into the current allocation of funding and shed light on which sectors are thriving and which are faltering.
Tell us about Nozomi Nozomi is the open-source YC for Web3 - providing free playbooks, funding support investor introductions, network connections, and expert advisory on strategy, marketing, and community so founders can build, raise, and scale successfully. We solve a major problem: in Web3, having a great idea isn’t enough—founders need access to proven growth strategies, the right investors, hands-on execution support, and the right network at the right time. We fix this with our four core pillars.
Nozomi’s Founders Library open-sources the Web3 playbooks, ensuring GTM, growth, and fundraising strategies are freely available for all founders, while the Funding Program connects founders with top investors. This year, our goal is to help founders raise $100M across chains in 2025, ensuring capital flows into sustainable projects rather than short-term speculation. Lastly, our expert advisory and wide network help connect founders with top operators, ensuring they get the right insights and introductions at the right time to launch and grow.
Too often, we forget the bigger picture. Web3 was meant to break centralized power structures, but today, success is still controlled by a select few. Nozomi’s goal is to return Web3 to its original ethos—ensuring builders, not just insiders, have access to the best resources.
What inspired the creation of Nozomi? Each cycle exposes major flaws in Web3: predatory VC deals, misaligned incentive models, unsustainable token models, and founders left without the “right” support. I spent years helping scale Web3 companies at Immutable and Animoca, amongst others. We kept seeing great founders struggle—not because they lacked vision, but because they lacked the right opportunities–backing, access, and resources.
Web3’s growth playbook has been locked behind closed doors. With Nozomi, we’re changing that by making the best strategies, funding networks, and execution support open to everyone. The next cycle will reward utility, not speculation—Nozomi ensures founders are ready.
What kinds of projects or founders are you looking to support? I firmly believe in backing founders building beyond market cycles—not short-term speculation, but real, sustainable businesses. For 2025, our focus includes Decentralized AI & Compute (DePIN), infrastructure that centralized actors don’t control. We want to help transition into AGI with humanity at the center.
Next is the Agentic Web – any Autonomous, AI-powered applications. Lastly, we’re keen on Creator Economy & Composable IP as new ways to monetize content on-chain, with a big area of interest in Web3 Consumer Applications, real-world use cases that bring new users into crypto. Why do you think “a network” is important beyond funding and advisory help? Because money and advice alone don’t build great projects, many investors, grant programs, accelerators, and incubators give advice, but founders are left figuring out how to implement it.
Moreover, being told to "improve tokenomics" or "refine your GTM" doesn’t help unless there’s a roadmap to actually do it with access to the right partners for support. I want to ensure we don’t just tell founders what to do. We help them execute by opening doors for them.
Whether it’s getting tokens listed, market-making, designing a token model, scaling user acquisition, refining an investor pitch, or anything in between, we make sure strategy translates into action with the right backers. Strategy without access and action is meaningless. I don’t stand for it.
Web3 founders often struggle with misaligned incentives in traditional funding models. How does Nozomi help capital partners align with long-term project success? The biggest issue in Web3 fundraising is misalignment. Many investors push for short-term liquidity rather than long-term success, demand large token allocations that leave little for the community, and /or exit too early, damaging the project’s momentum.
I only connect founders with long-term capital partners—investors who actually contribute beyond just capital. The Nozomi network includes Tier-1 venture firms, market leaders, and strategic investors who back founders for the long haul. My experience in VC means we connect founders with the right partners—not just capital but true backers.
We also work with founders to structure tokenomics, fundraising strategies, and incentive models that attract sustainable investment rather than speculative capital. What areas of web3 do you believe are still highly investable, and where do you see the industry heading in the next year or so? I think the strongest investment opportunities right now are in Decentralized AI & Compute (DePIN), all Web3 infrastructure that removes centralized gatekeepers of which DePIN is the biggest, most applicable use case at present. Then, Agentic Web – AI-powered autonomous applications, Real-World Assets (RWA) Tokenization, where we bring real-world value on-chain.
While at the moment, we’re halted by regulatory hurdles, in time, there’s no denying society will be on-chain. Lastly, I believe composable IP & Creator Monetization is the next evolution of content ownership. Web3 is moving from an era of experimentation to implementation.
The winners won’t just be the most decentralized platforms—they’ll be the ones that make decentralization usable and scalable. We’ll move from a society of mass consumers to mass creators. You emphasize open-source resources for founders.
How do you see this approach empowering the next generation of Web3 builders, and what kind of impact do you hope it will have on the ecosystem? Web3 was built on decentralization and permissionless access but the most valuable knowledge—how to fundraise, grow, and scale—has been locked away in insider circles, cabals, alpha groups, walled gardens, all closed networks, or access is denied to the general public. Nozomi is open-sourcing that knowledge and access. Over the next few months, we have a new course going live each week.
There are 5 phases in total, and we have collaborators from the trenches, growth experts, strategists, marketers, and more who’ve grown and scaled Web3 companies. The first fundraising playbook is live! It has the breakdown of fundraising in Web3 from the “other side” of the table, giving knowledge investors don’t want founders to know, from “hidden phrases” widely used and their real meaning to how to draft a pitch deck, structure the round, cold call templates, and more. It’s my firm belief that if someone has the drive to build, they should have the tools to succeed and shouldn’t need insider connections to thrive.
The last crypto cycle saw a lot of short-term hype and unsustainable projects. How does Nozomi help founders build for long-term success? All prior market cycles rewarded hype. But the industry is growing more legitimately, and we’re sure the coming ones will reward substance.
Ethereum, Solana, and Uniswap survived because they were built for the long term. The projects that failed relied on speculation instead of solving a real problem. Nozomi ensures founders build sustainable projects by focusing on real adoption, coupled with sustainable hype (we are in the attention economy, after all), strong token models that last beyond bull markets, and community-driven growth strategies that create long-term value for all stakeholders in the ecosystem.
If your project can’t survive outside of a bull market, it isn’t a real business, is it? The crypto space is rapidly evolving, with different ecosystems, blockchains, and communities growing in parallel. How does Nozomi plan to bring these groups together? Web3 is so tribal—but good founders choose the infrastructure that actually works for their use case. Our goal is not about one chain winning over another but using the right infrastructure for the right purpose.
Nozomi is ecosystem-agnostic. We work across Ethereum, Cardano, Injective, Movement, Aptos, BNB, Arweave, Story Protocol, Berachain, Polkadot, Cosmos, and more—connecting founders with the best tools, investors, and strategies for their specific ecosystem. We’ve already started working with L1s, and L2s to build their accelerator and incubator program content, help with Demo Days, and plug them into our network for capital.
We’re always on the lookout to plug more ecosystems into our network and help builders get funded. If you’re an ecosystem lead, DM us (@NozomiNetwork). For founders navigating today’s challenging funding environment, what are some of the biggest opportunities you see, and how can they position themselves to take advantage of them? Funding hasn’t disappeared—it has become more selective.
The best projects are still getting funded, but only if they can prove they solving a real problem, have sustainable tokenomics, and can showcase real user retention, not just hype. The biggest mistake founders can make is assuming hype alone will get them funded. Investors are backing companies that will still be relevant five or ten years from now.
The second part is storytelling. You're already losing if you can’t explain what your project does to a five-year-old. To founders, the most helpful advice is to use the free playbooks from the Founders Library for their strategy, narrative, and positioning to stand out in this competitive market.
The tools are available, they just need to use them..
