Seed Club Ventures Emerges From Stealth With $25M DAO-Focused Fund

Seed Club, a DAO-focused accelerator program, launched its venture capital arm out of stealth mode with a $25 million fund, which the team shared exclusively 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, the one of the co-founders of Seed Club Venture - or "instigators", as he called himself. "The thesis focuses on the shift from web2-created platforms, such as YouTube, to web3 creator economies, where value is shared by creators within communities."

The venture capital arm has been "quietly investing" since the third quarter of 2021 and has backed projects like Guild, Stability AI, Lens and Metalabel, Avedissian explained. 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 this is the right time for the internet and crypto to become community owned,” said NiMa Asghari, instigator of Seed Club Ventures. “Crypto is definitely one of the big pieces of the puzzle, but we felt that this philosophy that communities can own and have a source of funding was missing, and we want to be an example of that.”

Capital will be deployed over the next two years into projects in the pre-seed and seed stages of building infrastructure, applications 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 collectively owned by communities and, in theory, allow participants to make operational decisions without centralized direction, often through token-based governance. Major DAOs typically focus on raising capital to support specific causes or to buy something, like LinksDAO, which has a mission to buy a golf course.

Over the past couple of years, DAOs have been gaining momentum in the crypto space, but the popularity (or hype) around them has since slowed. Although a number of prominent ones still exist within the crypto community, they aren't really embraced by the mainstream.

"This might be controversial, but I'd say we have too many DAO tools and more companies building tools than governable DAOs, but that's only natural in every boom and bust cycle There is an overshoot of what is needed,” Asghari said.

"We see projects mature and move from this paradigm of all-in-one tools in the CAD space to more modularity and openness, and that's one of our core values. We don't don't want to invest in a single 'Salesforce' in the DAO space; we want to support many projects and make them interact together,” Asghari added.

In the future, he plans to support founders who create 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, as the next step in the evolution of human coordination," Avedissian said.