This week, the company invested $5 million in Agora, a front-end DAO management solution

Blockchain startups were Things got hot when Katie Haun left Andreessen Horowitz in 2021 to start her own cryptocurrency-focused enterprise capital firm. However, shortly after Haun announced that the two Haun Ventures funds had reached a combined amount of $1.5 billion, cryptocurrency prices plummeted and FTX collapsed.

Despite having a large arsenal of dry powder, Haun Ventures has been slow to get into crypto and web3 on the low-cost, with many observers wondering when the company will pick up its pace of adoption.

While Haun Ventures says it wasn’t exactly sitting on its hands (and capital) during the cryptocurrency market downturn, the company was perhaps more cautious than it initially intended.

But now that bitcoin prices have rebounded to previous highs, Haun Ventures’ investment activity is increasing dramatically. Including some token items, the company has made 48 investments in accelerator funds value $500 million in early-stage and $1 billion in later-stage funding, Haun Ventures told TechCrunch.

The company’s latest investment is Agora – an application that improves voting and other decision-making processes in decentralized autonomous organizations. On Tuesday, the company led a $5 million seed round to Agora, with participation from Seed Club, Coinbase Ventures, Balaji Srinivasan and others.

Sam Rosenblum, partner at Haun Ventures, said a big barrier to DAO participation was the lack of an easy user interface that may allow members to approve (or vote on) the implementation of software updates to the protocols they manage.

The process was very fragmented. Some decisions were made on a separate Discord channel; “Then (the community) would go somewhere else to vote on whether to allocate treasury dollars to a specific project,” Rosenblum said.

Agora solves this problem for DAO members by providing an easy-to-use community and protocol management solution. “Historically, if you wanted to participate in the allocation of protocol vault resources, you had to perform a number of on-chain activities yourself, which likely meant you had a hardware and software configuration that most people didn’t have,” Rosenblum said.

Agora goals to make it easier for non-technical users to take part in DAO. Rosenblum compared it to Coinbase, which made coin trading simpler for most individuals.

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 actually a SaaS offering, is already utilized by protocols reminiscent of Optimisma href=”https://agora.ensdao.org/” goal=”_blank” rel=”noopener”>ENS and Uniswap.

Rosenblum explained that these protocols are pleased to pay Agora since it helps lower the barrier to participation of their community.

While activity in the cryptocurrency world is actually accelerating, Rosenblum didn’t say exactly when Haun Ventures will finish rolling out its current fund. However, he said that investments will proceed next 12 months.

When Keith Rabois announced in January that he was leaving Founders Fund and returning to Khosla Ventures, it got here as a shock to many within the venture capital ecosystem – and never simply because Rabois is a giant name within the industry.

This was surprising because, unlike in lots of other fields, venture capitalists traditionally don’t move fairly often – especially those that rise to the extent of partner or general partner, as was the case with Rabois.

VC funds have a 10-year lifecycle, and partners have a great reason to stay that course. In some cases, they could be “key people” in an organization’s fund, which suggests that in the event that they leave, the fund’s LP investors have the appropriate to withdraw their capital in the event that they so select. Many partners and GPs also invest a few of their very own money of their firm’s funds, giving them another excuse to stick with the firm.

So while it isn’t common for high-profile investors to move into the venture capital space, it seems to have happened in recent months. So far this 12 months, there have been significant cases of investors returning to old corporations, withdrawing from investments on their very own or stopping investing altogether.

Just TodayVic Singh, one in all the co-founders of Eniac Ventures, announced he was leaving the corporate he helped present in 2009 to start his own.

Singh joins a growing list of VCs who’ve recently left corporations.

April

• April 30 Ethan Kurzweil announced after 16 years he was leaving his position as a partner at Bessemer Venture Partners. According to him, Kurzweil will create an investment company specializing in early-stage development reports from Axios. Kurzweil will launch the corporate with Christina Shenwho left Andreessen Horowitz on March 29 after 4 years, and Mark Goldberg, who left Index Ventures last fall after eight years.
• April 1 Christina Farr announced that he’ll leave OMERS Ventures, where he has been the lead investor since December 2020 and heads the corporate’s medical technology practice. Farr announced at

March

• After six years as a partner at Accel Ethan Choi announced that he’ll leave the corporate in March and go to Khosla Ventures. Choi will deal with growth-stage investing in his recent company and has backed corporations comparable to Klaviyo, Pismo and 1Password.
• While lots of the recent VC moves have been made by people looking to start something recent or pursue a unique opportunity, not all have done so. March 13, Chamath Palihapitiya Social Capital announced that he fired his partners Jay Zaveri AND Ravi Tanuk. Bloomberg reported that it was due to a fundraising case for the AI ​​startup Groq.
• Rabois wasn’t the just one who dreamed of a boomerang return to its old stomping ground amid the recent surge in investor reshuffles. March 5 Miles Grimshaw announced that after three years in the identical position at Benchmark Capital, he’ll return to Thrive Capital as a general partner. Grimshaw began at Thrive Capital in 2013 and has supported corporations comparable to Airtable, Lattice and Monzo, amongst others.
• While the transition from operator to VC is a standard profession progression process within the startup ecosystem, it isn’t for everybody. March 4 Blonde herself announced that he has come to this conclusion and is leaving Founders Fund, where he was a partner for about 18 months. Blond said he would return to operations and has held positions at corporations including Brex, Zenefits and EchoSign.

January

• After 12 years of labor at Andreessen Horowitz Connie Chan announced she left the corporate on January 23. Chan has been one in all the corporate’s general partners for the past five years and has supported corporations comparable to Cider, KoBold and Whatnot.

Startups don’t avoiding large projects. Here’s my takeaway from the news that The Browser Company’s Arc Browser is now generally available to Windows users, just as Island has raised massive capital for its enterprise browser tool. It’s very encouraging to see startups embracing the core elements of technology, not only the apps available on platforms.

Of course, Chrom still reigns supreme, but it surely may take a while to do away with this horse.

Elsewhere in Startup Land on Equity this week, we delved into Chowdeck’s $2.5 million round. This is a Nigerian company that is reporting impressive growth in the sphere of food delivery in a very difficult market. Keep a watch on this as Nigeria is a big market and no single company has a closed delivery operation there. At least though.

We also took a glance New $150M Corelight Fundraisewhich is excellent news to chew on given its valuation and revenue growth.

On the venture front, we covered two stories: First, Intuition’s commitment to the buyer market is particularly interesting. The Paris-based fund is betting that the most effective approach to make as much money as possible is to go against the B2B SaaS narrative. Second, we see the creation of a new venture capital supergroup: Axios informs that investors with experience at a16z, Bessemer and Index are constructing a new company.