Paradigm Backs $5M Round in DAO Management Platform Dework

Dework, which aims to be a combination of Trello and LinkedIn for Web 3, raised $5 million in a seed funding round that was co-led by crypto investing giant Paradigm and early-stage venture capital firm Pace Capital. The fresh capital will help Dework expand from its current three-person core team and several contributors, founder and CEO Lonis Hamaili told CoinDesk in an interview.

Dework is a Web 3-native collaboration tool where decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) can organize internal and external teams, manage tasks and bounties in a transparent way, and help new members get started, according to a draft blog post provided to CoinDesk.

Other investors in the round included Balaji Srinivasan, a former chief technology officer at crypto exchange Coinbase, and Sandeep Nailwal, a co-founder of the Polygon crypto platform.

Dework targets common pain points for DAOs, which can have thousands of members and can’t use traditional project management tools like Jira or Linear that use a pay-per-seat pricing model, Hamaili said.

The organizations tend to have overly broad permissioning systems that simply split people into “member” and “admin” categories that don’t necessarily reflect the varying amounts of work, history and trust in the community. Members also can’t easily build up a clear work profile of contributions across multiple DAO projects.

On the project management side, Hamaili said that DAO communities want more visibility into the work of the core team and most active contributors. Dework also addresses the lack of transparency in tooling that makes it difficult for new contributors to quickly get up to speed and start participating. .

The platform has been used by a number of noted DAOs, including OpenDAO, AragonDAO, CityDAO (where Hamaili was the first engineering contributor) and ShapeshiftDAO.

“Dework gives Web3 builders all the tools and talent necessary to help ambitious DAOs reach their full potential," Paradigm researcher Anish Agnihotri wrote in an emailed statement to CoinDesk. "The team has built a decentralized solution for a decentralized set of challenges and we're excited to be part of their journey as they continue to grow and innovate."

Read more: What Do DAOs Actually Do?