Niraj Pant dropped out of the University of Illinois at 19 to join Polychain as one of its earliest employees and rose to General Partner while still in his early 20s, leading investments in over 30 projects including dYdX, Compound, and Arbitrum through a research-first approach that moves from academic papers to backing executable teams. He left his successful VC role in 2023 to co-found Ritual, a decentralized AI execution layer that raised $25M by focusing on net-new Web3 use cases rather than bringing crypto rails to traditional AI customers. Niraj Pant dropped out of the University of Illinois at 19 to join Polychain as one of its earliest employees and rose to General Partner while still in his early 20s, leading investments in over 30 projects including dYdX, Compound, and Arbitrum through a research-first approach that moves from academic papers to backing executable teams. He left his successful VC role in 2023 to co-found Ritual, a decentralized AI execution layer that raised $25M by focusing on net-new Web3 use cases rather than bringing crypto rails to traditional AI customers.