Haun Ventures rides to the top of bitcoin

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.