As part of the deal, Joseph Chee, founder and chairman of Summer Capital, will become chairman of Helius Medical Technologies’ board. Cosmo Jiang, general partner at Pantera, will also be a board director. And Dan Morehead, founder and CEO of Pantera, will become a board advisor.
“We believe we have the right setup to be the leading, if not, at least one of the two or three, but certainly the leading, Solana DAT [digital asset treasury],” Jiang told Fortune in an interview.
The company is the latest entrant in crypto’s hottest trend: loading up the balance sheets of small publicly traded companies with cryptocurrency.
The strategy was first popularized by the company Strategy, formerly called MicroStrategy. In 2020, Michael Saylor, founder and executive chairman, announced that his firm was adding Bitcoin to its balance sheet. Traders soon saw the stock for Saylor’s company as a proxy for the world’s largest cryptocurrency, and as Bitcoin surged, so did Strategy’s shares—well beyond the price of the underlying crypto held by the firm.
Jiang, the general partner at Pantera, said he believes that there can only be a handful of successful public companies devoted to just one cryptocurrency, and the deal structure for his Solana treasury firm positions it to be competitive.
“We’d much rather start with a moderate size so that we can really go out to market and grow very quickly, rather than start too big and then have a harder time growing on a percentage basis,” he said.
In other words, he and others who helped facilitate the deal designed it so the $500 million fundraise can quickly be followed with a $750 million injection of capital, a one-two punch of funding power.
“Just as much as it is about scale,” he said, “it’s about velocity.”
