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DAOs, VCs Put $6M Behind Governance Startup Tally
If DAOs are basically a "group chat with a bank account," they're going to need more tooling to go mainstream, say Tally's founders.
Updated May 9, 2023, 3:22 a.m. Published Aug 12, 2021, 3:33 p.m.
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Tally, a platform that builds governance infrastructure for decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), announced Thursday it raised $6 million in a funding round led by Blockchain Capital and Placeholder.
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But the round wasn’t entirely funded by venture capital.
Tally’s co-founder and CEO, Dennison Bertram, told CoinDesk that approximately 25% of the funding came from DAOs themselves including The LAO, MetaCartel Ventures and Fire Eyes DAO, as well as DAO-affiliated angel investors, including Ryan Sean Adams, the founder of Bankless.
DAOs – which Tally CTO and co-founder Rafael Solari describes as essentially a “group chat with a bank account” – are exploding in popularity as decentralized finance (DeFi) continues to gain momentum.
DAO members band together, share assets and make decisions as a group, which can look like anything from a decentralized company with revenue and payroll and products, to a group of people pooling money together to buy a CryptoPunk.
Read more: Early CryptoPunk Digital Collectible Sells for $762K in Ether
Up until this point, the governance infrastructure for DAOs has been relatively bootstrapped, but Tally’s co-founders believe that for DAOs to go mainstream they need a way to overcome the structural growing pains that many DAOs have experienced.
Tally’s platform offers DAOs voting structure and analytics, member transparency and governance tools. The software is already used by protocols including Gitcoin, FEI and Ampleforth as the primary DAO interface.
"We believe that DAOs have the potential to be more scalable and more equitable than corporations,” Aleks Larsen, partner at Blockchain Capital, said in a press statement. “The Tally team has helped the oldest and largest DAOs solve critical governance and operational problems and is the partner of choice for new DAOs."
Bertram told CoinDesk the money will be used to hire additional engineers and advertise Tally’s platform.
The new funding follows a $1.5 million seed round announced in March.
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