The firm this week invested $5M in Agora, a front-end solution for DAO governance.

There were blockchain startups. Katie Haun made headlines in 2021 when she left Andreessen Horowitz to start her own crypto-focused venture firm. But shortly after Haun announced that Haun Ventures' two funds totaled $1.5 billion, cryptocurrency prices crashed and FTX fell.

Despite having a massive arsenal of dry powder, Haun Ventures has not been quick to stake in crypto and web3 on the cheap, and Many observers were surprised When the firm picks up its pace of deployment.

While Haun Ventures says it hasn't exactly sat on its hands (and capital) through the crypto downturn, the firm was perhaps more cautious than it initially intended.

But now that bitcoin prices have returned to their previous highs, Haven Ventures' investment activity is picking up dramatically. Haun Ventures told TechCrunch that including some of its token positions, the firm has made 48 investments in its early-stage $500 million and $1 billion in later-stage acceleration funds.

The firm's latest investment is Agora, an app that streamlines voting and other decision-making for decentralized autonomous organizations. The firm led a $5 million seed round at Agora on Tuesday, which included Seed Club, Coinbase Ventures, Balaji Srinivasan and others.

Sam Rosenblum, a partner and investment Team Lead at Haven Venturesstated that a major barrier to DAO participation was the lack of a simple user interface that allows members to approve (or vote) the implementation of software upgrades to the protocols they are governing.

The process was highly fragmented. Some decisions were made in a separate Discord channel. “You (the community) would then go elsewhere to vote on the allocation of treasury dollars for a particular project,” Rosenblum said.

Agora solves this problem by providing an easy-to-use community and protocol governance solution for DAO members. “Historically, if you wanted to participate in the distribution of protocol treasury resources, you had to do a bunch of on-chain actions yourself, which probably meant you had to set up hardware and software. that most people don't have,” Rosenblum said.

Agora aims to make DAO participation straightforward for non-technical users. Rosenblum compared it to Coinbase, which made trading coins easier for most people.

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 primarily a SaaS offering, is already used by protocols such as Optimisma href=”https://agora.ensdao.org/” target=”_blank” rel=”noopener”>ENS and to change.

Rosenblum explained that these protocols are happy to pay for Agora because it helps lower the barrier to participation in their community.

While activity in the crypto world is certainly picking up, Rosenblum did not say when Haun Ventures will be deploying its current fund. But he said the investment would continue into next year.