Haun Ventures is riding the bitcoin high

Blockchain startups were hot when Katie Haun left Andreessen Horowitz to start her own crypto-focused venture firm in 2021. But shortly after Haun announced that Huan Ventures’ two funds totaled $1.5 billion, cryptocurrency prices crashed and FTX collapsed.

Despite having a massive arsenal of dry powder, Haun Ventures has been in no rush to pick up shares in crypto and web3 on the cheap, leaving many observers wondering when the firm will ramp up its deployment pace.

While Haun Ventures said it didn’t have full holdings (and capital) due to crypto’s decline, the firm was perhaps more cautious than it originally intended.

But now that Bitcoin prices have risen to their previous highs, Haun Ventures’ investment activity is increasing significantly. Haun Ventures told TechCrunch that the company has made 48 investments, including $500 million in early-stage and $1 billion in later-stage accelerator funds, including some token positions.

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

Sam Rosenblum, partner and investment team leader at Haun Ventures, said a key obstacle to DAO participation is the lack of a simple user interface that allows members to approve (or vote) on the implementation of software upgrades to the protocols they use. governing.

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

Agora 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 trove, you had to do a bunch of on-chain actions yourself, which probably means you have hardware and software setup that most people don’t have,” Rosenblum said.

Agora needs to make DAO participation easier for non-technical users. Rosenblum compared this to Coinbase, which makes trading coins easier for most people.

The company was founded in 2022 by Charlie Feng, one of the founders of fintech Clearco; Coinbase product designer Yitong Zhang; and software engineer Kent Fenwick.

Essentially a SaaS offering, Agora is already used by protocols such as Optimism, ENS and Uniswap.

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Rosenblum explained that these protocols make them happy to pay for Agora because it helps reduce barriers to participation in their community.

While activity is certainly picking up in the crypto world, Rosenblum did not say exactly when Haun Ventures would deploy its existing funding. However, he said that investments will continue next year.