California-based venture fund Andreessen Horowitz announced Tuesday that it is leading a Series A investment round for Syndicate, a decentralized platform with a lofty vision to democratize investing by allowing users to create decentralized autonomous organizations, or DAOs.
Ali Yahya, one of Andreessen’s general partners, said his company was attracted to Syndicate’s vision for DAOs being at the center of economic coordination between people. DAOs, which are internet-native organizations collectively owned and managed by community members, have the potential to replace archaic legacy systems currently in use today, according to Yahya.
The Andreessen executive compared DAOs with corporations, arguing that the former “are a better, digitally native mechanism for human coordination” because they replace existing enterprise functions with software code.
Syndicate launched a version of its platform in private beta in June of this year after raising $800,000 from several investors. In March, the company generated $1 million in seed investments led by IDEO CoLab Ventures.
Series A funding is often pursued by budding startups that are looking to scale their operations through outside investments. Companies that reach this stage have developed a solid track record or established a promising user base. While Andreessen Horowitz didn’t specify a target for the Syndicate investment round, most Series As raise less than $20 million.
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Venture funding has poured into the blockchain industry this year, as investors look to capitalize on promising use cases involving distributed ledger technology. Andreessen Horowitz has been at the forefront of these capital raises, having only recently launched the biggest-ever crypto venture fund at $2.2 billion. More recently, platforms devoted to cryptocurrency trading and nonfungible tokens have seen some of the biggest funding rounds.
