The Yedid-Botton Initiative

The Initiative

The Yedid-Botton Initiative is dedicated to supporting critical infrastructure and defense technologies through strategic investments and philanthropy. Active since 2020, the Initiative has made significant contributions to these areas and beyond.

Investments & Support

Defense Technologies

"Si vis pacem, para bellum."
"If you want peace, prepare for war."

- Julius Caesar

The Yedid-Botton Initiative supports organizations and individuals that develop defense systems and technologies.

The global balance of power is shifting, and the status quo no longer guarantees stability. The prosperity we enjoy today exists because previous generations invested in the technologies that created modern peace and abundance.

With the understanding that civilization is still at the beginning of its story, the Initiative supports real-world technologies that protect life, deter adversaries, and strengthen the foundations for future civilizations.

Critical Infrastructure

"We used to look up at the sky and wonder at our place in the stars. Now we just look down and worry about our place in the dirt."

- Cooper, Interstellar

Civilization depends on critical infrastructure: energy, water, communications, and the markets that connect them. These systems are the invisible backbone of prosperity. When they fail, the rest follows.

The Yedid-Botton Initiative supports work that secures and expands these essential building blocks. We don't expect to see overnight changes. Still, we are confident that, over the course of our lives, we will be able to anchor the infrastructure that supports a more stable and prosperous future.

Kevin Yedid-Botton's Story

Kevin Yedid-Botton grew up in Mexico City and moved to the United States at 13 on a hockey scholarship. He studied Applied Physics at Emory University before launching Tenzar Technologies in 2015, a high-performance computing company. Tenzar was born from a simple observation: the computing infrastructure powering modern research was outdated, slow, and unable to meet the demands of AI and machine learning.

Tenzar provided infrastructure to research institutions such as the University of California, CERN, and other compute-intensive organizations. He pursued a sale of the company, though it ultimately did not materialize.

In 2018, Kevin turned his focus to an emerging industry full of inefficiencies: digital-asset markets. With a natural affinity for computing, physics, and markets, he joined Reality Shares, an SEC-regulated ETF asset manager and an early pioneer of factor-based blockchain exchange-traded funds. There, he worked on quantitative trading strategies.

He left his position and joined ParaFi Capital, a young digital-asset firm managing under $10 million at the time. He saw the same pattern he had seen in computing: broken infrastructure, fragmented markets filled with inefficiencies, and an opportunity to build something far better. By 2019, he became a partner and portfolio manager at ParaFi, leading the firm's quantitative strategies and technology. ParaFi has since grown to more than $2 billion in assets and counts many of the world's leading financial institutions as investors.

Outside ParaFi, Kevin pursues challenges with deep intensity--open-water swimming, triathlons, and flying, and more.