Doubling Down on Upstream, the easiest way to create and run a DAO.

At boldstart, our mission is to back founders from day one over many companies throughout their career. We first got to know founders Alex Taub and Michael Schonfeld during their time at Dwolla nearly 10 years ago. We were fortunate to back them first with Socialrank in the analytics infrastructure space, and now again with Upstream.

When users won an eBay auction in 1996, they likely sent the seller a check as payment via snail mail — it was painful and took a long time. Then came PayPal, which made online payments “as easy as email” and was the killer app that fueled a whole generation of companies transacting on the internet.

Today, we see the same thing happening in Web3 and crypto. Communities are forming around a shared wallet and transacting in new ways with governance that’s fully transparent on the blockchain. But like 1996, it’s fragmented across different tools with a painful user interface. Enter Alex Taub and Michael Schonfeld at Upstream.

Upstream makes running DAOs an order of magnitude easier, by bringing together treasury, voting, governance, token gating, group chat, governance, delegation of votes, and a wallet into one cohesive experience.

We are fired up to be doubling down to lead Upstream’s Series A, joined by our friends at Tiger Global, Vayner Fund, Fenbushi Capital, Panoramic Ventures, Alpaca VC, Human Ventures, Blumberg Capital, The Medici Group. As well as a group of amazing angel investors listed on the company’s blog.

We see a massive new market opportunity to build the defacto platform for creating and running DAOs. This round allows the team to move faster and capitalize on their impressive momentum, growing from zero to over $2m in treasury in a few short months in private beta.

Doubling down on Upstream adds to our crypto infrastructure portfolio which started with Changetip in the payments space in 2014 and now includes companies like Blockdaemon, Stakewise, Mstate which seeded Fireblocks and Amberdata, and a number in stealth.

What is a DAO? Want to try Upstream? Read more from Alex Konrad @ Forbes.