Haun Ventures is riding the bitcoin high | TechCrunch

The firm invested $5M this week in Agora, a front-end solution for DAO governance

were blockchain startups When Katie Haun left Andreessen Horowitz in 2021 to launch her own crypto-focused venture firm, it was exciting. But shortly after Hohn announced that two of Hohn Ventures’ funds raised a total of $1.5 billion, cryptocurrency prices plunged and FTX collapsed.

Despite having huge reserves of dry powder, Hon Ventures did not rush to make bets in crypto and Web3 on the cheap, and Many observers were surprised When the firm picks up the pace of its deployment.

While Hone Ventures says it wasn’t exactly sitting on its hands (and capital) during the crypto meltdown, the company was perhaps more cautious than initially expected.

But now that Bitcoin prices have reached their previous high, investment activity from Han Ventures is increasing dramatically. Including some of its token positions, the company has made 48 investments across its early-stage $500 million and $1 billion late-stage acceleration funds, Hahn Ventures told TechCrunch.

The firm’s latest investment is Agora, an app that streamlines voting and other decision making for decentralized autonomous organizations. The company led a $5 million seed round on Tuesday in Agora with participation from Seed Club, Coinbase Ventures, Balaji Srinivasan and others.

Sam Rosenblum, a partner and investment Leading the team at Haun Venturesstated that a significant 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 protocols they govern.

This process was highly fragmented. Some decisions were made in a separate Discord channel, then “then you.” [the community would] Go somewhere else to get a vote on allocating treasury dollars for a certain project,” Rosenblum said.

Agora solves this problem for DAO members by providing an easy-to-use community and protocol governance solution. Rosenblum said, “Historically, if you wanted to participate in the resource allocation of a protocol treasury, you had to perform a bunch of on-chain tasks yourself, which probably meant you had to have the hardware and software setup that most people can do.” has not got.”

Agora aims to simplify DAO participation for non-technical users. Rosenblum compared it to Coinbase, which made coin trading 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 optimism, ens And uniswap,

Rosenblum explained that these protocols are happy to pay for Agora because it helps lower the barrier to participation in their community.

While activity in the crypto world is certainly ramping up, Rosenblum did not say when Haun Ventures will deploy its current fund. But he did say that the investment will continue next year also.