Anthony Pompliano's crypto recruitment firm raises $12.6 million and buys rival

Inflection Points, the Miami-based crypto recruitment and training firm co-founded by Anthony "Pomp" Pompliano, has unveiled a $12.6 million funding round and a deal to acquire a rival company.

According to an announcement on Wednesday, investors in the round include Peter Thiel's Thiel Capital, Fifth Down Capital, XYZ Fund, Rose Park Advisors, Blockchange, Third Prime, former Palantir CFO Colin Anderson, Eight Sleep CEO Matteo Franceschetti, former Allergan CEO Brent Saunders and real estate mogul Marc Roberts. The firm has also acquired Proof of Talent, a New York-based crypto recruitment firm founded by Rob Paone. 

Pompliano, a media personality and investor with 1.6 million Twitter followers and nearly 400,000 YouTube subscribers, co-founded Inflection Points in early 2021 with Colton Sakamoto, according to the announcement. The firm, which was previously known as PompCryptoJobs and also has training and headhunting divisions, claims to have trained and employed over 4,000 people in the crypto industry to date. It has been profitable since inception and raised the outside capital only after it hit "seven figures" in revenue.

The announcement comes amid a flurry of layoffs in the crypto market, including at exchanges like Coinbase, Gemini and BitMEX. As previously reported by The Block, more than 1,500 people have been laid off across the sector. Pompliano said that could be an opportunity for his firm as large non-crypto businesses need specialists to helpcrypto talent that could include those who were recently laid off.

"We work with companies native to bitcoin and crypto, but also companies that may only have a single crypto effort as part of larger non-crypto company. Reed Smith — an 1,800 person law firm — is good example on the training side of this too," Pompliano told The Block. 

As part of the deal, Fifth Down Capital's founder and managing partner Andrew Spellman has joined Inflection Points' board of directors.

Proof of Talent, the firm being acquired by Inflection Points, was founded by Paone in June 2019 and claims to have helped 100 individuals find jobs at more than 40 companies. As part of the acquisition, Paone and his eight colleagues are joining Inflection Points.

"By combining Proof of Talent's specialist recruitment experience and talent acquisition team with the scale of Inflection Points education and training programs, we're poised to create the most comprehensive hiring solutions for talent and employers in the industry," Paone said in the statement.

Terms of the deal weren't disclosed.

Update 9:15 a.m. ET: adds background on the crypto jobs market.