The company this week invested $5 million in Agora, a front-end solution for DAO governance.
Blockchain startups were hot when Katie Haun left Andreessen Horowitz in 2021 to launch her own crypto-focused venture capital firm. But shortly after Haun announced that Haun Ventures’ two funds totaled $1.5 billion, cryptocurrency prices crashed and FTX collapsed.
Despite a massive arsenal of dry powder, Haun Ventures has not rushed to acquire stakes in crypto and web3 on the cheap, and many observers have wondered when the company would accelerate its pace of deployment.
Although Haun Ventures says it wasn’t exactly sitting on its hands (and capital) during the crypto downturn, the company may have been more cautious than it initially anticipated.
But now that Bitcoin prices have rebounded to their previous highs, Haun Ventures’ investment activity is increasing significantly. Including some of its token positions, the company has made 48 investments under its $500 million early-stage and $1 billion later-stage accelerator funds, Haun Ventures told TechCrunch .
The company’s latest investment is Agora, an application that streamlines voting and other decision-making for decentralized autonomous organizations. The company led a $5 million seed round in Agora on Tuesday, with participation from Seed Club, Coinbase Ventures, Balaji Srinivasan and others.
Sam Rosenbluma partner at Haun Ventures, said a significant barrier to DAO participation was the lack of a simple user interface for members to approve (or vote on) the implementation of software upgrades to the protocols that they govern.
The process was very fragmented. Some decisions were made on a separate Discord channel; “You (the community) would then go elsewhere to vote on allocating treasury dollars to a certain project,” 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 the resource allocation of a protocol treasury, you had to perform a certain number of on-chain actions yourself, which probably means you have a hardware and software setup that most people don’t,” Rosenblum said.
Agora is meant to make it easier for non-technical users to participate in the DAO. Rosenblum compared it to Coinbase, which makes coin trading simpler for most people.
The company was founded in 2022 by Charlie Feng, co-founder of fintech Clearco; Yitong Zhang, Coinbase product designer; and software engineer Kent Fenwick.
Agora, which is essentially a SaaS offering, is already used by protocols such as Optimisma href=”https://agora.ensdao.org/” target=”_blank” rel=”noopener”>ENS and Uniswap.
Rosenblum explained that these protocols are happy to pay for Agora because it helps reduce barriers to participation in their community.
While activity is certainly picking up in the crypto world, Rosenblum did not say when Haun Ventures will have finished rolling out its current fund. But he said investments would continue next year.
