“The tokenization of money, data, identity, energy and intelligence will reshape the world's most important industries. Backs pre-seed and seed teams building decentralized physical infrastructure, machine data networks, liquidity rails and attention platforms, underwriting people before there is revenue, users or product.”
Sector split covers all 35 companies on the EV3 portfolio page, classified by EV3's own groupings. Chain split covers only the four companies whose chain we could verify (DAWN, Natix and XNET on Solana, Glow on Ethereum); treat it as indicative.
Escape Velocity, written EV3, is an early-stage fund co-founded by general partners Mahesh Ramakrishnan and Salvador Gala. It announced a $61.74M Fund II in January 2026 and states its thesis in one line: the tokenization of money, data, identity, energy and intelligence will reshape the largest industries. In practice that has made EV3 one of the most active DePIN investors of the last cycle.
What sets the fund apart is how early it goes and how openly it says so. EV3 writes $500K to $5M "before there is revenue, users, or a product even exists" and says it underwrites people rather than traction. The portfolio page is organised as a map with four regions: Attention Basins (creators, consumer, deep tech), Liquidity Basins (credit, asset management, privacy, payments), Machine Maps (stationary, mobile and high-density sensor networks) and Physical Infrastructure (bandwidth, compute, energy). Names include DAWN, XNET and Aro in bandwidth, Daylight, Glow and Drill in energy, Natix and Auki in machine mapping, Prodia and Codigo in compute, and Opacity and Unlink in privacy.
The other unusual feature is process. The site invites founders to send "a deck, memo, repo, or blurb (with contact info)" through a public form and commits to respond within 48 hours. For a pre-seed founder that is a rare combination of speed and a real cheque.
Key stats:
| Partner | Role | Where to find them |
|---|---|---|
| Mahesh Ramakrishnan | Co-founder and General Partner | ev3.xyz |
| Salvador Gala | Co-founder and General Partner | ev3.xyz |
| Brandon Leppke | COO and General Counsel | ev3.xyz |
| Steen | Chief of Staff | ev3.xyz |
| Zoltan | Operations | ev3.xyz |
Fund handle: @ev3ventures on X. Individual partner handles and the team page URL were not resolvable when we fetched (the /team path returned 404), so the homepage is linked.