Bitcoin
Haun Ventures is rising in bitcoin
Image credits: Haun Ventures
Blockchain startups were on the rise when Katie Haun left Andreessen Horowitz in 2021 to launch her own crypto-focused venture firm. But shortly after Haun announced that Haun Ventures’ two funds totaled $1.5 billion, cryptocurrency prices plummeted and FTX collapsed.
Despite having a huge arsenal of dry powder, Haun Ventures didn’t rush to acquire crypto and web3 holdings on the cheap, and many observers wondered when the company would accelerate its pace of implementation.
While Haun Ventures says it wasn’t exactly sitting on its hands (and capital) during the crypto crisis, the company was perhaps more cautious than it initially intended.
But now that bitcoin prices have recovered to previous highs, Haun Ventures’ investment activity is increasing dramatically. Including some of its token positions, the company has made 48 investments in its $500 million early-stage and $1 billion later-stage acceleration funds, Haun Ventures told TechCrunch.
The company’s most recent investment is Agora, an app 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 Rosenblumpartner at Haun Ventures, said a significant impediment to DAO participation was the lack of a simple user interface that allows members to approve (or vote on) the implementation of software updates to the protocols they govern.
The process was highly fragmented. Certain decisions were made in a separate Discord channel; “You then [the community would] go elsewhere to vote on allocating Treasury dollars to a particular project,” Rosenblum said.
Now 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 would have to perform several on-chain actions yourself, which probably means you have hardware and software configurations that most people don’t have,” Rosenblum said. .
Agora should make participating in the DAO simple for non-technical users. Rosenblum compared it to Coinbase, which made currency trading simple for most people.
The company was founded in 2022 by Charlie Feng, co-founder of fintech Clearco; Coinbase product designer Yitong Zhang; and software engineer Kent Fenwick.
Now that it is essentially a SaaS offering, it 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 gladly pay off Agora because they help lower the barrier to participation in their community.
While activity is certainly accelerating in the crypto world, Rosenblum did not say exactly when Haun Ventures will finish deploying its current fund. But he said the investments will continue next year.