DAOLens Raises USD 5M In Pre-Seed Funding Round

The Bengaluru-based Web3 startup DAOLens has raised USD 5 million (nearly 39 crore) in a pre-Seed funding round led by Web3 investors Nexus Venture Partners, Better Ventures and iSeed II.

The round also saw participation from Web3 investors, including Gokul Rajaram, Board of Director, Coinbase, Sandeep Nailwal , Co-founder of Polygon, Raj Gokal, Co-founder of Solana, Simon Doherty, VP of Animoca Brands, and Arjun Sethi, Co-founder of Tribe Capital.

Other marquee investors, including Balaji Srinivasan, Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal, Co-founders of Snapdeal, Kunal Shah, CEO of CRED, Manish Agarwal, CEO of Nazara Technologies, as well as Vishal Gupta and Narendra Rathi, investment advisors at Softbank, also participated in the round.

“This successful pre-seed funding round is a testimony to the strength of our project and the belief in the roadmap as well as the team. Simplifying the way DAOs connect with their community addresses a serious challenge that the Web3 world faces. No one can predict the future with certainty but given how DAOs are maturing, it is a challenge that is in desperate need of a head-on tackle and we are here to do that,” Vikram Aditya, CEO and Co-founder of DAOLens said in a statement,

The firm is also planning to launch Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) to selected investors as a token of its gratitude. Apoorv Nandan and Vikram Aditya co-founded DAOLens to help Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) effectively onboard and manage contributors. Currently, the startup is building a host of infrastructure-based DAO tooling to minimise the contributor churn and help new users onboard a DAO.

Recently, Polygon, an Ethereum scaling platform on boarding millions of people to Web3 has announced the launch of eDAO-- an organisation to design and launch global art, media and entertainment intellectual Properties at scale, into the world of Web3.

eDAO will create a unified experience for the largest spectrum of culture and entertainment to provide communities with a single access pass to chart unique experiences in the web3 ecosystem. eDAO is backed by a myriad of venture capital and angel investors, including Jump Capital, Alphawave, Brevan Howard, Polygon Studios, and Polygon CEO Sandeep Nailwal.

What Is DAO

DAOs are an effective and safe way to work with like-minded folks around the globe. Think of them like an internet-native business that's collectively owned and managed by its members. They have built-in treasuries that no one has the authority to access without the approval of the group. Decisions are governed by proposals and voting to ensure everyone in the organization has a voice.

There's no CEO who can authorize spending based on their own whims and no chance of a dodgy CFO manipulating the books. Everything is out in the open and the rules around spending are baked into the DAO via its code.

How Does It Work

The backbone of a DAO is its smart contract. The contract defines the rules of the organisation and holds the group’s treasury. Once the contract is live on blockchain, no one can change the rules except by a vote. If anyone tries to do something that’s not covered by the rules and logic in the code, it will fail. And because the treasury is defined by the smart contract too that means no one can spend the money without the group’s approval either. This means that DAOs don't need a central authority. Instead, the group makes decisions collectively, and payments are automatically authorised when votes pass.

This is possible because smart contracts are tamper-proof once they go live on blockchain. You can't just edit the code (the DAOs rules) without people noticing because everything is public.