The company invested $5 million in Agora, a front-end solution for DAO governance, this week
Blockchain startups were red hot when Katie Haun left Andreessen Horowitz in 2021 to launch her own crypto-focused venture firm. But shortly after Haun announced that the two Haun Ventures funds totaled $1.5 billion, cryptocurrency prices plummeted and FTX collapsed.
Despite having a huge arsenal of dry powder, Haun Ventures was not quick to acquire crypto and web3 stakes on the cheap, and many observers wondered when the company would accelerate its pace of implementation.
While Haun Ventures says it didn’t exactly sit back (and with capital) during the cryptocurrency slowdown, the company was perhaps more cautious than it initially intended.
But now that bitcoin prices have rebounded to their previous highs, Haun Ventures’ investment activity is increasing dramatically. Including some of its token positions, the firm has made 48 investments in 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 on Agora on Tuesday, with participation from Seed Club, Coinbase Ventures, Balaji Srinivasan and others.
Sam Rosenblum, partner and investor team leader at Haun VenturesHe said that a major impediment to DAO participation had been the lack of a simple user interface that would allow members to approve (or vote on) the implementation of software updates to the protocols they govern.
The process was very fragmented. Certain decisions were made in a separate Discord channel; “Then you [the community would] go somewhere else 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 bunch of on-chain actions yourself, which probably means you have a hardware and software setup that most people don’t have.” Rosenblum said.
Agora is supposed to make DAO participation easier for non-technical users. Rosenblum compared it to Coinbase, which made trading currencies simple for most people.
The company was founded in 2022 by Charlie Feng, who co-founded fintech Clearco; Coinbase product designer Yitong Zhang; 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 the barrier to participation in their community.
While activity is certainly accelerating in the cryptocurrency world, Rosenblum did not say exactly when Haun Ventures will finish deploying its current fund. But he did say the investment will continue into next year.