OpenSea and Circle Back $6M Raise for DAO Platform Syndicate

Syndicate, a platform to bring decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) mainstream, has gathered another $6 million from customers and strategic partners, including the likes of Circle Ventures, OpenSea, Uniswap Labs Ventures and Carta.

Syndicate, which went live with its legally compliant investment DAO toolset just three months ago, has raised close to $28 million thus far, including a $20 million Series A round last summer and prior to that an $800,000 community round from over 100 well-known names in the crypto space.

Syndicate co-founder Ian Lee said the additional $6 million was “an informal customers and strategic partners raise closed in a matter of weeks,” as opposed to a structured Series B. Think of it more like last year's community round, but “on steroids,” he said.

“In the three months since we’ve been live it’s been really crazy,” said Lee in an interview. “We’ve seen nearly 1,200 investment clubs as DAOs launched on Syndicate. Also, a bunch of our customers and users asked if they can be a part of Syndicate and invest in us. So it was very organic, and also very strategic.”

Read more: Decentralized Investing Platform Syndicate Raises $800K From 100 Investors

Cryptocurrency and Web 3 companies appear to have had no problem raising large sums of money of late, but often the quality of participants backing a project is as important as the runway itself – as is clearly the case with Syndicate.

As far as the latest round of backers is concerned, Lee mentioned Carta, which has a large number of companies and investors on its platform and capabilities in cap-table management and fund administration in the off-chain fintech world. Meanwhile, firms like Circle, Uniswap and OpenSea are helping shape Syndicate’s DAO infrastructure, Lee said.

“A lot of DAOs want something like banking accounts, and USDC is really exciting in terms of creating almost banking-like solutions,” Lee said. “Uniswap has extremely powerful infrastructure for exchange and liquidity, obviously, and a lot of our investment clubs are trading tokens or buying NFTs on OpenSea, for example, so partnering up with industry leaders in those areas makes a lot of sense for us.”