seed club, a DAO-focused accelerator program, has thrown its venture arm out of stealth mode with a $25 million fund.
“Seed Club is a DAO for builders at the intersection of builders and culture with three areas: an accelerator, a community of members, and now the venture arm”said Anthony Avedissian, one of the co-founders of Seed Club Venture – or “instigators”, as he nicknamed himself. "The thesis focuses on moving from web2 creation platforms like YouTube to web3 creation economies where value is shared by creators in communities."
The venture arm has been "quietly investing" since Q2021 XNUMX and has backed projects like Guild, AI stability, Lens y metalabelAvedissian shared. It has 63 members, including cryptocurrency venture capital firms like Multicoin Capital, Delphi Digital, and Dragonfly Capital, as well as family offices, traditional VCs, and corporations. But around half of the members are individuals from the cryptocurrency sector, he added.
“We believe that the time is right for the Internet and cryptocurrencies to be owned by communities”says NiMa Asghari, founder of Seed Club Ventures. “Crypto is definitely one of the big pieces of the puzzle, but we felt that this philosophy of communities being able to own property and have a source of funding was missing, and we want to be an example of that.”
The capital will go over the next two years to projects in the pre-seed and seed phases that build infrastructure, applications and tools for DAOs and open communities, with checks ranging from $100.000 to $1 million, Avedissian said.
DAOs, or Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, are groups that belong collectively to communities and, in theory, allow participants to make operational decisions without centralized leadership, often through token-driven governance. Major DAOs often focus on raising capital to support specific causes or buy something, like LinksDAO, whose mission is to buy a golf course.
In the last two years, DAOs have gained a lot of momentum in the crypto space, but their popularity (or hype) has slowed down since then. Although some of the most prominent ones still exist in the cryptocurrency community, they are not really reaching mass mainstream adoption.
“This can be controversial, but I would argue that we have too many DAO tools and more companies building tools than governable DAOs, but that is natural in every boom and bust cycle. There is an excess of what is needed," Asghari said.
“We are seeing projects mature and move from this paradigm of all-in-one tools in the DAO space to being more modular and open, and that is one of our core values. We don't want to invest in a single 'Salesforce' in the DAO space; we want to support many projects and have them interoperate with each other,” added Asghari.
In the future, he plans to back founders creating DAOs and "Internet Native Organizations" in cryptocurrency, as well as other categories such as artificial intelligence, art, and music.
“We believe that Internet-native organizations, as we call them, are the next step in the evolution of human coordination,” Avedissian said.
