Aptos Co-Founder Launches $50 Million Venture Fund ‘For MFers Ready to Build’

Mo Shaikh and his team raised a total of $400 billion to launch Aptos Labs in 2022. Now he’s helping other founders do the same.

Aptos co-founder Mo Shaikh loves using the a-word, “adoption.” He believes today’s crypto venture funds are missing the key ingredients of operator experience and mentorship that startups need to progress from prototyping to growth. That’s why on Tuesday, Shaikh and three former Aptos executives, announced that their new firm Maximum Frequency Ventures (MFV) had raised $50 million to fund ambitious crypto founders.

Shaikh is a seasoned corporate veteran and successful entrepreneur. “I wore a lot of suits before at BCG, BlackRock, RBC,” he says. His fellow MFV co-founders, Neil Harounian, Alexandre Tang, and Jerome Ong, also have similarly impressive resumes. “We know what it takes because we’ve carried the weight ourselves,” Shaikh explains.

The common thread uniting the MFV team, is of course, its experience at Aptos. The platform is a layer-one blockchain whose market capitalization was just above $2.6 billion at the time of writing. Aptos is one of several projects spun out of Meta along with the likes of Sui and Lightspark after Diem (formerly Libra), Meta’s crypto project, was shut down in 2022 due to regulatory hurdles.

Shaikh says Aptos has more than 200 projects building on its platform, which has given the MFV team a front-row seat to cutting edge innovation. They know what successful crypto projects look like, even as the team steps away from Aptos. Successful projects manage to get adoption, but Shaikh uses a different phrase to describe the mindset of successful founders: “MFers ready to build,” which he says also explains the “MF” in MF Ventures.