seed cluba DAO-focused accelerator program, launched its venture arm out of stealth mode with a $25 million fund, the team exclusively shared with TechCrunch.
“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 seed club companyThe ‘s co-founders, or “instigators,” as he called himself. “The thesis focuses on the shift from web2 created platforms like YouTube towards web3 creator economies where creators share value in communities.”
The venture arm has been “quietly investing” since Q3 2021 and has backed projects like Guild, AI stability, Lens and metallic labelAvedissian shared. It has 63 members, including crypto venture capital firms like Multicoin Capital, Delphi Digital, and Dragonfly Capital, as well as family offices, traditional VCs, and corporations. But about half of the members are individuals in the crypto space, he added.
“We believe that now is the right time for the internet and cryptocurrencies to be owned by communities,” said NiMa Asghari, instigator at Seed Club Ventures. “Crypto is definitely one of the big pieces of the puzzle, but we felt that this philosophy that communities can have ownership and have a source of funding was missing, and we want to be an example of that.”
The capital will be deployed over the next two years in pre- and early-stage projects building infrastructure, apps and tools for DAOs and open communities with checks ranging from $100,000 to $1 million, Avedissian noted.
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-based governance. Major DAOs typically focus on raising capital to support specific causes or to buy something, like linksDAOwho is on a mission to buy a golf course.
In the last couple of years, DAOs gained a lot of momentum in the crypto space, but since then the popularity (or hype) around them has slowed down. While several standouts still exist within the crypto 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 creating governable tools than DAOs, but that is natural in every boom and bust cycle. There is an excess of what is needed,” Asghari said.
“We’re 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’s 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 together,” added Asghari.
In the future, he plans to support founders building DAOs and “Internet-native organizations” in crypto, as well as other categories such as artificial intelligence, art, and music.
“We see Internet-native organizations, as we call them, the next step in the evolution of human coordination,” Avedissian said.
