Outlier Ventures poaches prominent Web 3 executives Des Martin and Eser Torun while increasing investments in the Open Metaverse

Europe Business

Leading Blockchain and Web 3 accelerator Outlier Ventures today announces Des Martin as Chief Marketing Officer, and Eser Torun as Chief of Staff.

 

Based in Ireland, Des Martin joins from Brave where he served as VP of Growth & Marketing. He grew their daily active users from 800k to 11M, which positioned Brave as one of the breakthrough Web 3 projects. Prior to that, he led marketing teams at two high growth tech companies, Perkbox and Qualtrics, through periods of rapid growth. Perkbox gained recognition by both Linkedin’s Top UK Start-Ups and the National Business Awards under his direction. Martin continues to actively invest and mentor Web 3 companies.

 

Based in London, Eser Torun joins from Everledger where she most recently served as Chief Growth Officer during which she was also recognised as one of Europe’s Most Influential Women in FinTech and one of the Top 10 most influential leaders in wealth management. Prior to that she spent eighteen years in Investment Banking across Barclays and Citibank in executive leadership roles where she more than tripled revenue and clients in her respective business units. Sha was also a member of the Blockchain Innovation Council at Barclays Investment Bank.

 

Des and Eser both have excellent track records of vigorously growing companies in early stage tech and established financial markets. That combined with their penchant for Innovative technologies means they are the best fit for Outlier’s accelerator. As we ramp up our activities in investing for decentralized technologies in Web 3 and technology convergence, we couldn’t hope to find more suited leaders to lead growth in this builder’s market,” says Jamie Burke, Founder & CEO at Outlier Ventures.

 

Jamie went on to add “I strongly believe in the Open Metaverse, and crypto’s role in it as the growth engine. At early stage ventures I see the opposite that you see in the secondary markets; there are more startups and increasingly more funds, with more capital coming into Web 3 and connecting with our accelerator than ever.”

 

The appointment of Martin and Torun follows strong recent growth for Outlier with aggressive hiring across the US and London, and talks of further senior hires in the coming months. Outlier’s backing for early stage Web 3 innovators is also accelerating, with the firm having onboarded 130+ start-ups into their accelerator in collaboration with the likes of crypto giants HBAR foundation, Protocol Labs, New Order DAO and Polygon. They are forecasted to accelerate another 100 start-ups by year end.

 

Outlier Ventures has been backing Web 3 founders since 2014 and is the world’s leading Open Metaverse accelerator program, as one of the first investment firms dedicated to investing in the emerging crypto ecosystem. Their portfolio includes notable projects across DeFi, NFTs and blockchain infrastructure with a focus on emergent Open Metaverse use cases such as NFT-based play-to-earn games, augmented reality and more. Outlier Ventures portfolio can be found here.

 

Both Base Camp and Ascent are constantly looking for founders accelerating the open Metaverse thesis by launching token networks. We provide a proven framework for growth while weaving together a global network of over 1,000 of the world’s leading Web 3 founders, protocols, and investment firms to form an ecosystem of mentorship and investment.