Hello world, and welcome to Dove Dispatch #20!
Today, we are digging into the fundraising ecosystem for projects building DAO tools.
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DAOs have been gaining momentum over the past 6 months. Julia Lipton even raised 62+ ETH on Mirror to build DAO Masters, a website “to make it as easy as possible for you to set up a DAO and explore your DAO-curious-side”, inspired by Makerpad. With 1.62k Snapshot spaces, 984k governance token holders, and more than $7.9B in AUM as of today, DAOs appear to be at a major inflection point. It shouldn’t be a surprise that the tooling funding landscape is too.
Nichanan Kesonpat from 1kx recently published “Organization Legos: The State of DAO Tooling”, an excellent report that points out that DAO operations is a budding crypto vertical that remains underserved.
She also built a great chart of the DAO Tooling Landscape that we decided to use to categorize DAO tooling fundraising rounds.
With 20 deals and more than $88M raised since January 2021, DAO tooling-focused projects raised less than 0.5% of the fresh capital flowing into the crypto industry. Still, more than $41M was raised in Q3, against $15M in Q1 — a 174% increase.
With Syndicate and Tally leading the charge, more than $26M was raised in August alone.
The fundraising ecosystem of “organisation legos” is still in its infancy: 90% of the rounds were earlier than Series A, and on average, $4.5M is raised by a project building DAO tools, compared to $20.5M for the industry overall.
Four main categories stand out and account for 79% of the total amount raised:
Frameworks: a suite of smart contracts that enable users to create on-chain organizations easily, with key features related to investing, voting, or community management.
Content & Product: solutions that enable users to create and publish technical and non-technical content for an internal or external audience.
Compensation: payment distribution infrastructure to reward community members in an efficient way.
Governance & Voting: tools that help individuals voice their opinions, and empower representatives they trust to execute in ways aligned with their views.
Geographically, DAO tooling companies are quite concentrated. 75% of the teams which raised funds in 2021 are based whether in the United States or in Europe. By approving a first-of-its-kind bill that grants legal company status to DAOs, the state of Wyoming probably reinforced the United States’ dominance and accelerated capital injection into the space.
Last week 26 projects announced fundraising rounds:
Cobo ($40M) | World’s leading blockchain technology service provider, providing all-in-one crypto financial services including Custody, WaaS, Trading, Lending, DeFi, and Asset Management — with participation from DST Global, A&T Capital, and IMO Ventures.
Grape Protocol ($1.2M) | The toolset for Decentralized Social Networking on Solana — with participation from Multicoin Capital, SkyVision Capital, Definitive Capital, LongHash Ventures, Double Peak, and Solana Capital.
Libre DeFi ($800k) | High yield farming opportunities via a liquidity claw, farming protocol — with participation from Marshland Capital, Magnus Capital, Moonrock Capital, GHAF Capital Partners, CinchBlock, and Raptor Capital.
Blockdaemon ($155M) | A blockchain deployment facilitator that manages nodes and payment rails for blockchain networks — with participation from SoftBank, Matrix Capital Management, Sapphire Ventures, Morgan Creek Digital, Boldstart Ventures, Goldman Sachs, Greenspring Associates, Kenetic, Kraken, Borderless Capital, and Lerer Hippeau.
Waggle Network ($3M) | Enables retail investors to participate in primary market investments while providing project teams additional liquidity for the continuity of their innovations — with participation from Spark Digital Capital, GBV Capital, Solanium Ventures, TRG Capital, Bixin Ventures, Cropperbros Research, CSP DAO, NGC Ventures, Genblock Capital, LinkInsight, ZBS Capital, Pragma, Gate.io, AU21 Capital, Onemax Capital, HG Ventures, Basics Capital, SkyVision Capital, Magnus Capital, MXC Exchange, Shima Capital, and Bigcoin Capital.
One River Digital ($41M) | A leading digital asset manager for institutions — with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Goldman Sachs, Liberty Mutual Insurance, and Infinity Investment Partners.
Portal ($8.5M) | Allows building peer to peer, decentralized, and censorship-resistant applications as many layers on Bitcoin — with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Arrington XRP Capital, OKEX, Republic, Shima Capital, LD Capital, Monday Capital, Genblock Capital, Taureon Capital, B21 Capital, Krypital Group, and Autonomy Capital.
Orca ($18M) | The most user-friendly DEX on Solana — with participation from Zee Prime Capital, Coinbase Ventures, Solana Capital, Polychain Capital, Placeholder, Three Arrows Capital, Jump Capital, SinoGlobal Capital, Collab+Currency, and DeFiance Capital.
Dapper Labs ($250M) | The team that brought CryptoKitties, HelloDapper, CHZWZRDS, Flow, and NBA Topshot — with participation from Coatue Management, GV, Andreessen Horowitz, Version One Ventures, and GIC.
Taker Protocol ($3M) | A multi-strategy NFT loan protocol to optimize liquidation on NFT assets across chains — with participation from Electric Capital, Ascensive Assets, Dragonfly Capital, Spartan Group, Sfermion, The LAO, Morningstar Ventures, and Digital Currency Group.
Mines of Dalarnia ($2.7M) | Afree action game with a unique blockchain real-estate market — with participation from Crypto.com Capital, Animoca Brands, Coin98 Ventures, Jump Capital, NGC Ventures, Impossible Finance, Kyros Ventures, Drops Ventures, X21 Digital, Bitscale Capital, Crypto J, and Sanctor Capital.
cheqd ($2.6M) | A Web 3.0 startup founded by an ambitious and experienced team in the field of self-sovereign identity (SSI) — with participation from Outlier Ventures, TitanBlock, SkyVision Capital, ExNetwork Capital, Double Peak, Blue Node Capital, and Bixin Ventures.
Sorare ($680M) | The global fantasy football game where you can buy, trade, and play with official digital cards — with participation from SoftBank, Rio Gavin Ferdinand, LionTree, Institutional Venture Partners, Headline, Gerard Pique, Eurazeo, D1 Capital Partners, blisce, and César Azpilicueta.
prysm ($3M) | A collaborative investing economy enabled by web3 — with participation from North Island Ventures, Polychain Capital, Reciprocal Ventures, Lemniscap, CMT Digital, Free Company, Regan Bozman, Alameda Research, Infinite Capital, Flow Ventures, Drops Ventures, Zane Tackett, Tony Sheng, Imran Khan, Qiao Wang, Clay Robbins, Sergei Chan, and Marc Weinstein.
SundaeSwap ($1.3M) | Decentralized exchange on Cardano — with participation from Alameda Research, Double Peak, and cFund.
DeSo ($200M) | A new layer-1 blockchain built from the ground up to scale decentralized social applications to one billion users — with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Social Capital, TQ Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Winklevoss Capital, Polychain Capital, Pantera Capital, Arrington XRP Capital, Blockchange Ventures, Distributed Global, Blockchain.com, Hack VC, and Alexis Ohanian.
Amasa ($1.5M) | Building the world’s first micro income stream investment app — with participation from Animoca Brands, OKEX, SkyVision Capital, Spark Digital Capital, Momentum 6, Sandeep Nailwal, Gabby Dizon, LD Capital, Double Peak, Maeve Ventures, and Moonwhale Ventures.
Metrika ($14M) | Monitoring, analytics, and actionable insights for decentralized systems — with participation from Neotribe Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, SamsungNext, Nyca Partners, and SCB 10X.
Genesis Digital Assets ($431M) | One of the world's largest and most experienced Bitcoin mining companies — with participation from Paradigm, NYDIG, FTX, Ribbit Capital, Electric Capital, Kingsway Capital, SkyBridge Capital, and Stoneridge.
blyncc | Building a B2B blockchain payments platform tailored to SMEs that perform cross-border payments
Heroes & Empires ($1.5M) | The next-gen RPG NFT game — with participation from Megala Ventures, Raptor Capital, DAO Maker, UG Ventures, Interchain Ventures, Magnus Capital, X21 Digital, Basics Capital, CinchBlock, IceTea Labs, Metrix Capital, Crypto Viet Labs, Kyros Ventures, Alpha Moon Capital, Tienthuattoan Capital, Saigon TradeCoin, MCG Capital, CoinF, Infinity Capital, OnBlock Ventures, TK Ventures, Crypto Checker, SS Ventures, KiwiGROUP, HC Capital, and Wings Ventures.
GFX Labs ($2.5M) | Building crypto apps such as Poppie (credit card) and Etherlands (Minecraft on Ethereum)
Prim6 | Big data intelligence company offering a tokenized blockchain asset management SaaS
DiMuto ($2.4M) | A platform facilitating collaborative commerce that provides supply chain visibility — with participation from Seeds Capital, Latin Leap, Asia Capital Pioneers Group, PT Great Giant Pineapple, Patrick Vizzone, Ocean Crest Investments, SGInnovate, and The Yield Lab Asia Pacific.
TrueLayer ($130M) | A fintech platform utilized to build financial apps that connect to bank data, verify accounts, and access transactions — with participation from Stripe, and Tiger Global Management.
Ripio ($50M) | A financial payments company that provides electronic payment solutions for businesses in Latin America — with participation from Digital Currency Group, Boost VC, Marcos Galperin, Martin Migoya, Tim Draper, and Amplo.
We have also added the following investors: UG Ventures, Alpha Moon Capital, Tienthuattoan Capital, SS Ventures, Delta Blockchain Fund, Maeve Ventures, GHAF Capital Partners, and many angels.
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See you on Thursday for Thursday Thoughts #15,
The Dove Team