The company this week invested $5 million in Agora, a front-end solution for Dao governance.
Blockchain startups were in hot water when Katie Haun left Andreessen Horowitz in 2021 to launch a venture firm focused on cryptocurrencies. However, shortly after Haun announced that his two funds at Huan Ventures had a total of $1.5 billion, crypto prices skyrocketed and FTX collapsed.
Despite having a large amount of dry powder, Haun Ventures was in no hurry to raise crypto and Web3 stock cheaply, leaving many observers wondering when the company might pick up the pace of deployment. I was wondering.
Haun Ventures says it wasn't completely giving up its company (and capital) amid the crypto downturn, but the company was probably more cautious than originally intended.
But now, Bitcoin prices have recovered to previous highs and Haun Ventures' investment activity has increased dramatically. Haun Ventures told TechCrunch that he has made 48 investments across his $500 million early-stage and $1 billion late-stage acceleration funds, including some token positions. said.
The company's latest investment is Agora, an app that streamlines voting and other decision-making in decentralized autonomous organizations. The company on Tuesday led a $5 million seed round in Agora with participation from Seed Club, Coinbase Ventures, Balaji Srinivasan and others.
Sam Rosenblum, partner and investment team leader at Haun Ventures, said a major barrier to DAO participation is the lack of a simple user interface that allows members to approve (or vote on) the implementation of software upgrades to their protocols. I did. To govern.
The process was highly fragmented.Certain decisions were made on another of her Discord channels, and then “You [the community would] Go somewhere else to vote on whether to allocate Treasury funds to specific projects,” Rosenblum said.
Agora solves this problem for DAO members by providing an easy-to-use community and protocol governance solution. “Historically, if you wanted to participate in protocol treasury resource allocation, you had to perform a number of on-chain actions yourself. This probably required hardware and software setup that most people did not have. ,” Rosenblum said.
Agora aims to make it easy for non-technical users to participate in DAOs. Rosenblum compared this to Coinbase, which has simplified coin trading for most people.
The company was founded in 2022 by Charlie Feng, co-founder of fintech company Clearco. Yitong Zhang, product designer at Coinbase. and software engineer Kent Fenwick.
Agora is essentially a SaaS product and is already used in protocols such as Optimism, ENS, and Uniswap.
Rosenblum explained that Agora is willing to pay for these protocols because they help lower the barrier to participation in the community.
While activity is certainly accelerating in the crypto world, Rosenblum declined to say exactly when Haun Ventures will complete the rollout of its current fund. But he said the investment would continue next year.