Today, we welcome Navraj Rai as Blockdaemon’s new VP of Finance. Navraj brings a wealth of experience to Blockdaemon. She began her career in New York, and has worked at Evercore, Cerberus Capital Management and SoftBank Investment Advisers.

In her career to-date, Navraj has amassed valuable experience in financial services across mergers & acquisitions (M&A), private equity and growth equity investing. Her depth of knowledge in these fields and others is a boon to Blockdaemon as we continue to scale. She also holds a degree from Ivey Business School at Western University. Today, we welcome Navraj to the team, and take this opportunity to highlight some of her stories and accomplishments.

Navraj’s Career Journey

Navraj joins Blockdaemon from Softbank Investment Advisers where she helped to invest across both Vision Fund 1 and 2 and led the Fund’s investment in Blockdaemon. In her role at the Vision Fund, Navraj invested in high growth technology companies across several industries including fintech, enterprise, proptech and consumer social.

Navraj has seen how investor and market perception has changed around technology startups in recent years, especially towards Blockchain adoption. She has witnessed the evolution of leading technology companies across various stages of their growth cycle through IPO and appreciates the incredible opportunities ahead for Blockdaemon.

Prior to Softbank, Navraj began her investing career at Cerberus Capital Management, an operationally focused private equity fund. She helped to lead value-oriented investments in companies that were facing operational challenges or headwinds, including disruption from technology-driven companies. Navraj’s experience balances her view towards achieving high-growth and long-term value accretion.

Now, her passion for disruptive, world-changing technology combined with her deep knowledge of finance has led her to Blockdaemon.

Why Navraj Joined Blockdaemon

Blockdaemon, Navraj believes, stands at the confluence of many drivers of growth. Within blockchain infrastructure, the waters of fintech, financial institutions, exchanges, crypto native startups and more all meet and interact in new and exciting ways.

This, Navraj states, gives rise to many opportunities to serve institutional clients with new and exciting tech stacks. She sees Blockdaemon’s product-focused culture as one of Blockdaemon’s core strengths. Investing in companies that are product oriented was a key consideration for Navraj during her tenure as an investor.

The products Blockdaemon are building, she says, better bridge institutional clients with their customers using blockchain, and Blockdaemon’s quality and white glove offerings are second to none. The practical focus on product, Navraj says, should fuse with a vision of what clients in the future will look for. To this end, Navraj sees that one of Blockdaemon’s strengths lies in building value in verticals such as DeFi, staking and node management.

By building value in these fertile fields, Blockdaemon gains a powerful vantage point for the future. Being vertically integrated in key growth areas creates competitive moats. Navraj claims that while technology over time may become commoditized, true long term value is created by being vertical domain experts across the rising categories of the future.

Certainly, staking, node and DeFi ecosystems have many competitors, yet it is Blockdaemon’s ability to create deep tech solutions in each of these fields that truly add-value to clients long-term, according to Navraj. Beyond Blockdaemon’s tech stack, Navraj sees the strength that lies in the company’s deep talent pool. The underlying technology is driven by the quality of Blockdaemon’s engineering capital.

It is a testament to Blockdaemon’s acquisitions in 2021 that highlight its ability to on-board top tier companies as well. Beyond the strong pool of in-house experts lies another advantage. Navraj recognises Blockdaemon’s ability to cultivate, nurture and support everyone in the company. It’s this commitment to teaching and sharing knowledge that helps get everyone up-to-speed, even if someone joins from a non-blockchain background. Navraj is sure that having everyone on the same level playing field is a must.

Welcome, Navraj!

Once again, we welcome Navraj to Team Blockdaemon. Her achievements are a testament to her depth of knowledge and skill set in the field of finance. We are proud to have her on board.

If you’re excited about blockchain and are interested in joining our team, why not check out our careers page?

We are always looking for exceptional people to join.