The startup behind the popular decentralized finance (DeFi) system, Uniswap Labs, has formed a venture capital arm to fund web3 businesses.

According to the business, Uniswap Labs Ventures will invest in companies at various phases and regions inside web3, from infrastructure to developer tools and consumer-facing products. The Block first reported that investments will be made directly from the business’s balance sheet, albeit the company did not specify how large these checks will be or how much balance sheet resources will be committed to the fund.

Along with Uniswap’s chief operating officer, Mary-Catherine Lader, Matteo Leibowitz will lead the venture arm. Starting in August 2020, Leibowitz will work as a strategy lead at Uniswap.

Tenderly, LayerZero, MakerDAO, Aave, Compound Protocol, and PartyDAO were among the 11 firms and protocols Uniswap invested in before forming this dedicated venture arm, according to the company. The Ethereum-native exchange appears to have mostly backed other Ethereum-based businesses

Its new ventures team intends to participate actively in on-chain and off-chain governance “where appropriate,” according to the company. So far, it has stated that it intends to engage in the governance systems of MakerDAO, Aave, Compound, and Ethereum Name Service (ENS).

The news comes just a week after Uniswap Labs, its founder, and its investors — Paradigm, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), and Union Square Ventures — were named in a class-action complaint for allegedly engaging in widespread fraud.

Uniswap joins a growing group of crypto-native businesses that are explicitly devoting resources to investing in other businesses in the industry, such as crypto exchange FTX and DeFi protocol Cake, both of which recently announced venture funds. Through their early-stage investments, companies like Uniswap, which already have experience working in web3, can extend their skills and lessons gained to other aspects of the crypto market, according to DeFi researcher Ryan Rasmussen of Bitwise Asset Management.

According to blockchain data source DeFi Pulse, the decentralised exchange is the fifth-largest in DeFi by Total Value Locked (TVL), a statistic that represents the quantity of the assets on the system. As of April 11, it had $7.04 billion in TVL, around half that of the leading DeFi platform, Maker, according to DeFi Pulse.