Xenith launched in late 2018, but the conversation that led to it started a year earlier in a Seoul co-working space. Three of us, a whiteboard, and a list of things we wanted from a firm if we were the ones being backed.
The whiteboard list
It was simple.
1. Answer emails. The bar was that low and that important.
2. Real conviction about the open internet. Not as a sector trend. As a belief.
3. Show up after the wire. Not a quarterly advisory call. A real partner from week one.
4. Be willing to be early. Especially when consensus said wait.
That list became the operating manual. Most of it is still on the wall.
The name
Xenith comes from "zenith," the highest point in the sky. The X is deliberate. A marker, a crossing, an unknown. The name is the thesis.
The first three checks
All three were written in Q4 2018, into infrastructure companies, when most of the market had gone quiet. Two are still in the portfolio. The third was acquired in 2022. None looked obvious at the time. That's the point.
What's changed
The team is larger. The portfolio is larger. We operate from twenty countries instead of one. The sectors we cover have expanded as the open internet itself has, from infrastructure into fintech, finance, gaming, identity, AI agents, and the ground between Web2 and Web3.
What hasn't
The whiteboard. The four rules. The belief that the founders building the open internet deserve a firm that earns its place at the table every quarter.
That's the start of the story. The rest is the founders we back.