Nasir “Nas” Jones has reportedly participated in over 188 funding rounds as a financier. The Hip Hop legend’s Queensbridge Venture Partners places him among the top celebrity investors in the country, and he supposedly has a net worth of $70 million.
Apparently, Nas got in early in with the cryptocurrency exchange known as Coinbase Global. That 2013 investment could land the Grammy winner and QVP between $35 million and $174 million when Coinbase goes public.
Financial insiders suspect Coinbase will be valued at over $100 billion when the company begins trading on the Nasdaq Stock Market on April 14. Coinbase directly listed 114,850,769 shares of stock but did not propose a stock price.
Around 2013, Coinbase was valued at close to $143 million. The Brian Armstrong and Fred Ehrsam-founded platform raised $25 million in series B funding led by the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz also known as a16z.
According to Yahoo, Nas is friends with Ben Horowitz, the co-founder of the Silicon Valley-based Andreessen Horowitz. The 54-year-old American businessman may have tipped off Nas about backing the Coinbase start-up years ago.
“I want to meet the people who are innovating in all different fields, and investing lets me do that,” said Nas in 2016. “I meet the people that are changing the game across all different industries, and I get to be there first at the ground level. It’s helped me to progress tremendously in my business.”
Besides Coinbase, Queensbridge Venture Partners also invested in other brands such as Genius, Dropbox, SeatGeek, Lyft, Bevel, and Ring. The “If I Ruled the World (Imagine That)” emcee and his QVP partners reportedly netted more than $40 million when Amazon acquired the home security company Ring for an estimated value of $1.2 billion to $1.8 billion in 2018.
