About Pronomos Capital 

Pronomos Capital is a company for funding and building billionaire cities in locations across the global south. They have infrastructure projects underway in Honduras, South Asia, the Mediterranean, Palau, Nigeria and multiple other countries in Africa. There are currently eight colonial projects that we know of from Pronomos, but Pronomos operates in secrecy, and we must assume that the public information we have, is limited in scope compared to the scale of the effort. 

The existential goal of Pronomos is to create a network of sovereign tech cities, The Network State, where venture capitalists don’t have to answer to any nation-state, and can build their own colonial strongholds and conduct their affairs without public visibility, regulation or taxation. These are also sites to obtain labor and natural resources, and to push cryptocurrency on local peoples and governments, allowing them to take over the financial system.

Pronomos is only one of many companies tech billionaires use to operate, but it is one of the most important. Founded in 2019, it was created by the richest and most powerful venture capitalists in Silicon Valley. There is not publicly available information on the size of the Pronomos fund, but the people behind it represent trillions of dollars. 

Pronomos is backed by billionaires Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel and Balaji Srinivasan (from a16z and author of “The Network State”.) It is primarily associated with venture capitalist firms a16z and Founder’s Fund. These venture capitalists became extremely rich in the first internet bubble, and have continued to accumulate massive amounts of wealth and power. It is additionally funded by Joe Lonsdale of the PayPal Mafia and led by CEO Patri Friedman, grandson of Milton Friedman.

Since web 2.0, these venture capitalists have moved aggressively to secure sovereign land in a variety of locations across the global south, extracted through predatory business development deals, hostile legal maneuvering, and secrecy. The agenda of building sovereign cities has been in place for well over two decades, with venture capitalists and executives associated with the project, involved in prior efforts at sovereign cities via the Seasteading Institute and the Startup Societies Foundation, among others. 

They put out a book in 2022 called The Network State, by Balaji Srinivasan of Pronomos, which describes in detail this plot, and the desire of venture capital to establish sovereignty: “Technology has enabled us to start new companies, new communities, and new currencies. But can we use it to start new cities, or even new countries? This book explains how to build the successor to the nation state, a concept we call the network state.” 

While it may sound like a conspiracy theory, this is what they have said they are doing, what we can see they are doing, and we know they have the resources to pull it off. The venture capitalists running Pronomos control vast networks of startups, among them military, policing and surveillance tech, as well as experimental medical startups, and massive amounts of crypto infrastructure. Pronomos is the leader in a rapidly growing colonial agenda of venture capital, with the human rights crisis in El Salvador highlighting most clearly how the economic driver of venture capital is taking over countries, resulting in mass human rights abuses to clean up for the venture capital and crypto class. It is not a coincidence that the human rights abuses and installation of a mega prison in El Salvador coincides with venture capital invasion into the country, and its establishment in key government and economic positions. 

Status of Major Pronomos Settlements 

  • Praxis Society, Mediterranean: While the location has yet to be announced, information available on the Praxis website indicates the site will be on “thousands of acres of Mediterranean canvas” and is in “the final stage of site selection”. They are initially looking to recruit 10,000 settlers and have already recruited a huge block of commercial capital. Praxis highlights the predatory economic development packages venture capitalists are putting together, as well as its use of stealth tactics. 

There is also Afropolitan, a “digital nation” in the model of a startup accelerator or bootcamp targeting multiple countries in Africa. They have funded “Small Farm Cities,” based in Malawi, described as a “city starter,” to scale the creation of new cities and “enable the mass adoption of modern technology.” In these cases, the presence of venture capital and the force of venture capital money, is endangering and compromises work being done by good faith actors in these regions.   

Please see the Status of the Network State page for more information on these, and other venture capital settlements. 

Operations and Strategy

Pronomos frames colonial invasion as beneficial to targeted countries: “our mission is to build prosperous cities that uplift entire regions. We do this by working with citizens, states, and developers to upgrade laws and institutions for greater justice and well-being.” This is marketing language covering up for what they are materially doing, which is forcing their way into countries using secretive methods, legal attacks, take-over of positions of power in government, and false promises of economic revitalization. 

Venture capitalists promise they will create jobs for local communities to benefit their economic status, but this is belied by the many labor abuses by tech in these same regions, such as Nigeria and Kenya, where financial exploitation of ride-share drivers has sparked widespread labor organization, and content moderators and AI trainers have been paid just $1/$2 hour for extraordinarily stressful work, consistently associated with PTSD. Pronomos is heavily associated with Meta, OpenAI and Uber, three major and repeat labor exploiters in the area; the same people who funded these tech companies, are funding Pronomos.  

The pattern across Pronomos cities is to start with a “digital nation”, recruiting investment and the tech and crypto classes to be their citizens. This digital platform is used to organize and coordinate money and provide the legal instrument for colonization, in order to obtain land and sovereign zones. Their main audience is rich members of the tech and crypto class, who are millennials or Gen X; this will form the base population of the cities, bringing huge wealth inequality, displacement and labor exploitation with it.

We know the effect that these venture capital cities will have on the existing populations because we have seen their effect in California, where unchecked tech wealth has had ruinous effects on San Francisco and Oakland; importantly, key centers of leftist movement in the United States. Outside of San Francisco, in Solano County, Pronomos-associated venture capitalists have recently obtained $800 million of land secretly and through legal threats, in an area of majority people of color. This is their modus operandi. 

Importantly, venture capitalists in the past few years have ramped up anti-communist rhetoric, as leftist groups will be their primary opposition in their colonial and imperial aims. We do not have to wonder what the impact of venture capital expansion will be in these areas, as we already have seen them take over via economic packages, gentrification, real estate speculation, labor abuse, displacement and a sharp increase in militarized, tech-powered policing, in Silicon Valley, where they came from, but which no longer contains them.