Sam Lehman Joins Pantera Capital as Junior Partner
Former Symbolic Capital principal Sam Lehman is stepping into a new role as a junior partner at Pantera Capital, as exclusively reported by Blockworks.
According to Lehman, Pantera recruited him for his knowledge of investments at the crossroads of crypto and AI. The crypto venture capital firm is preparing for its first closing of Pantera Fund V, which aims to raise $1 billion. Cosmo Jiang, a general partner and portfolio manager at Pantera, has suggested that a substantial portion of the new fund will be allocated for investments focused on crypto-AI innovations.
Since its inception in 2013, Pantera has grown to become one of the largest and oldest firms in the crypto venture space, boasting $4.8 billion in assets under management. Over the past three months, it has completed the third-most deals among crypto VCs, according to Blockworks Research.
Previously, Pantera has shown support for Bittensor, and in March, Jiang mentioned that he is monitoring other projects, including Grass. Additionally, the firm led a $43 million funding round for the blockchain-AI startup Sahara AI in 2024.
With his appointment, Lehman will be Pantera’s fourth junior partner. The firm also employs two managing partners, two general partners, and two partners.
During his time at Symbolic, Lehman made several investments at the intersection of crypto and AI. He has also contributed written insights on the field, specifically regarding reinforcement learning and pre-training, which are methods used to develop AI models.
In late 2024, crypto and AI emerged as popular speculative investments in retail markets, with numerous projects linking tokens to AI agents—many of which turned out to be mere chatbots. Since then, the value of many of these tokens has significantly declined. Lehman’s interests extend beyond trends like the GOAT memecoin.
