a16z shines the spotlight on DAOs by leading Syndicate’s Series A

Syndicate’s vision for decentralized autonomous organizations was one of the biggest selling points for Andreessen Horowitz.

California-based venture fund Andreessen Horowitz announced Tuesday that it is leading a Series A investment round for Syndicate, a decentralized platform with the lofty vision of democratizing investing by allowing users to create decentralized autonomous organizations, or DAOs. 

Ali Yahya, one of Andreessen’s general partners, said that the company was attracted to Syndicate’s vision of DAOs being at the center of economic coordination between people. DAOs, which are internet-native organizations that are collectively owned and managed by community members, have the potential to replace the archaic legacy systems currently in use.

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 private beta version of its platform in June 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.

Related: 5G blockchain network raises $111M in Andreessen-led token sale

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 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 to date.