Ex-Symbolic Principal Joins Pantera to Supercharge Crypto-AI Investing Strategy

Wall Street meets artificial intelligence as former Symbolic principal jumps ship to crypto giant Pantera.

The AI-Crypto Convergence

Pantera just poached Symbolic's top talent to lead their bleeding-edge crypto-AI investment division. This isn't just another hire—it's a strategic power move targeting the $4.2 trillion AI-crypto intersection.

Decoding the Strategy

The new recruit brings quant-heavy expertise to Pantera's algorithmic trading desk. Expect machine learning models to dominate portfolio allocation while cutting human emotion from investment decisions entirely.

Market Impact

This signals institutional confidence in AI-driven crypto strategies—because nothing says 'mature market' like replacing fund managers with neural networks. Traditional finance firms now scramble to keep pace with crypto-native shops leveraging actual innovation rather than just recycling old PowerPoint decks.

Pantera previously showed support for Bittensor, and Jiang told Blockworks that he’s watching other projects, such as Grass, in March. It also led a $43 million round for the blockchain-AI startup Sahara AI in 2024.

Lehman will become Pantera’s fourth junior partner. The firm also employs two managing partners, two general partners, and two partners.

While at Symbolic, Lehman made multiple investments at the intersection of crypto and AI, he said. He has also written about the sector, particularly in regards to reinforcement learning and pre-training, two processes through which AI models are developed.

Crypto and AI became popular speculative retail bets in late 2024, with several new projects tying tokens to AI agents — which, in many cases, were just chatbots. Many of these projects’ tokens have since cratered. Lehman’s interests lie outside of curiosities like the GOAT memecoin.

“If we’re using [projects] like goat, zerebro, etc, to define [the intersection of] crypto [and] AI, then, yeah, I’d definitely say there is nothing exciting to invest in there,” Lehman said in a text. “For me, however, I’m focused on more distributed, open-source AI companies where the focus is on using blockchains very intentionally / sparingly to facilitate coordination of people all over the world to collaborate on building SOTA AI.”

Lehman said he was drawn to Pantera partly due to the opportunity to work with companies “throughout their full journey, not only at the earliest stages.” He also said the MOVE was due to the team he will be working with.

“I got to know the Pantera team during my time at Symbolic, having co-invested in several deals together. The team has a really unique mix of analytical rigor, warmth with founders, and extremely high integrity,” Lehman said.

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