I really want to stay away from any projects that VCs invested millions to billions of dollars into, no matter how good the project is it can be manipulated by these third party companies.
This won't end well unless you mean to invest before the VCs starts coming in because it's looking like without VCs backing, projects aren't doing so well in this time of the market. Those VC are the reason exchanges are listing the project without much background check as they should've done to regular projects. Looking at the coins that did the best return last year, you'll realize that they all have big Vc backing them and some of those VCs were exchange labs which Binance and FTX exchange are one of the finest.
VC backed projects do very well in the market and some recent examples are Solana, Aptos and most of the metaverse projects etc. When investing in this project, you should be active monitoring the market to know when to sell out of the market instead of leaving your investment without observation.