The company invested $5 million in Agora, a front-end solution for Dao governance, this week
Blockchain startups were hot when Katie Haun left Andreessen Horowitz in 2021 to start her own crypto-focused venture capital firm. But shortly after Haun announced that the two Haun Ventures funds totaled $1.5 billion, cryptocurrency prices crashed and FTX collapsed.
Despite having a huge arsenal of dry powder, Haun Ventures was in no rush to gain stakes in crypto and web3 on the cheap, and many observers wondered when the company would increase its growth rate.
While Haun Ventures says it wasn’t exactly on hand (and capital) during the crypto downturn, the company was perhaps more cautious than it originally planned.
But now that bitcoin prices have recovered to their previous highs, Haun Ventures’ investment activity is picking up dramatically. Including some of its token positions, the company 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 simplifies voting and other decision-making processes for decentralized autonomous organizations. The company led a $5 million round on the Market on Tuesday, with participation from Seed Club, Coinbase Ventures, Balaji Srinivasan and others.
Sam Rosenblum, partner and investment team leader at Haun Venturessaid that a major barrier to DAO participation was the lack of a simple user interface that allows members to approve (or vote) the implementation of software upgrades to the governing protocols.
The process was very fragmented. Some decisions were made in a separate Discord channel. “You, then [the community would] you go somewhere else to vote to put dollars into the fund for a particular project,” Rosenbloom said.
Agora solves this issue 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 fund, you had to script yourself on-chain, which probably means you have hardware and software setups that most people don’t have,” Rosenblum said.
Agora is supposed to make DAO participation simple for non-technical users. Rosenblum compared it to Coinbase, which simplified currency trading 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 Optimism, ENS and Unswap.
Rosenblum explained that these protocols are happy to pay for Agora because it helps lower the barrier to participation in their community.
While activity is certainly picking up in the crypto world, Rosenblum didn’t say exactly when Haun Ventures’ current fund will finish growing. However, he said investments will continue next year.
