Utopia: Received $23 million in financing led by Paradigm, the most important infrastructure of DAO

Original author: @cwweb3, DAO lover

Original title: "Utopia, which raised 23 million knives to help DAO pay contributors wages and medical insurance, is building the most important infrastructure of DAO economy"< /blockquote>

Utopia, which works as a DAO salary payment system, received a $23 million investment led by Paradigm, with a valuation of $115 million. This is an 8-person team that has been established for just over a year. Its clients include Sushi, Lido, YGG, FWB, etc.

What is Utopia?

Most of my friends probably haven’t heard of it, I participated two weeks ago They deal call and briefly summarize the information received.

The founders of Utopia met at a hackathon a year and a half ago. They tried to build an NFT Market product, but failed. After that, DAO gradually became lively, and they found that most of DAO's finances were still run on google sheets. (Too real, the DAO I participated in is still using google sheets for budgeting P&L, and sending money is to manually operate the wallet) So they built the current payment system.

The team was 4 people for the first 8 months, and now it's just 8 people. This is a very Asian team, and three of the four co-founders are Asian. . They've made some offers and will expand to 12 soon. The latest additions are all fierce people, including Calvin Liu, the brother is the first non-technical employee of Compound, the head of Compound strategy, and the initiator of a Venture. He joined Utopia as Head of Strategy as well.

Utopia's current product is built on top of Gnosis. This salary management and payment system already has many customers, and the growth is very good. In April, 15 million dollars were paid through this system. If DAO’s own native tokens are included, they manage 6 billion dollars in assets (this figure Slightly false, because most of DAO's own tokens have poor liquidity, and they have to be greatly discounted when calculating)

The specific product layers to be built are:

· Budget system 

· Bookkeeping system 

· On-chain hosting 

·Payment system 

·Reporting system

In the end, these systems will be connected together to build the financial infrastructure of DAO , used to manage the flow of labor and capital. Most of the governance decisions of DAOs are executed by humans, while the products built by Utopia can automatically trigger the business flow and capital flow after governance, and open up the financial coordination, governance and execution of DAOs.

When these systems are completed, Utopia's greater ambition is to help DAO with active management of funds. Through business understanding and data aggregation analysis, they will be able to conduct risk assessments on DAOs, thereby providing floating rate income deposits, insurance, and credit lending products. DAOs are very capital inefficient. The emergence of such a credit product will greatly improve this point. Utopia says it is a FinTech company, Web2’s Fintech companies eventually become banks, and they are banks in the DAO circle.

Compliance is another focus. Utopia will integrate compliance considerations into the business system and serve as an intermediate layer between onchain and offchain to achieve financial compliance at the DAO entity level and at the individual level. With the help of Utopia, individuals will have the opportunity to work in DAO and enjoy the payment of medical insurance, W2 salary payment (W2 is a concept in US taxation, and all official work income will be aggregated into W2 annual income). The more long-term plan is to form a permissionless financial market for the DAO field.

Utopia Profit Model

Two lines, one is the MRR model of the SaaS model (each Monthly recurring income, which can be simply understood as subscription income). The most basic payment system is used to develop customers for free, and based on this, up-selling and cross-selling are provided. Another more important branch is risk financial products, which have been mentioned in detail above and will not be expanded in detail.

How can I use such a large amount of money.

Employ the best people to make future products, explore Zk-based payroll and more innovative explorations, such as using your own business to track personal data in DAO The actual contribution and payment data build the onchain profile and provide it to the Web3 world with API.

Core Competence

The team's answer is that our product development is extremely community-oriented . Since the first day, we have been working closely with various communities to understand everyone's models, structures, and pain points. This allows us to design products that best fit the DAO world.

I also felt this from the process of chatting for a long time. They think very deeply at the product level, but they have no idea about market competition and Take the time to see it. It seems to be devoted to the world of DAO and concentrate on making the product well. The founder said that I am not afraid of competition, I am only afraid that I will not be close enough to everyone, fail to make good things, and lose these DAO partners.

Financing Details

Utopia completed a round of financing in October last year, with 1.5 million US dollars, Valuation unknown. Seven months later, the round raised $23 million at a post-money valuation of $115 million. Among them, 1.7 million was allocated to the community, basically their existing DAO customers and some angel investors who are deeply involved in the DAO field. The 1.7 million was snapped up, and many DAOs only allocated a quota of tens of thousands of dollars, purely for the sake of strengthening everyone's links.

Although the quota is not high, Utopia’s plan for the community is still sincere. This round directly accepts DAOs to pay with their own governance tokens (7-day average price) and promises to hold them for a long time, which can be regarded as a special treasury swap. Utopia does not currently have a token plan, this round is an equity round.

The basic situation is like this, the information organization is a bit messy, but all the points should be brought. Although it is already in a bear market, the Web3 track is still lively, but it has become a double sky of ice and fire. Under the current market conditions, many projects that are not good enough have no chance of exiting, and they may not be able to persist until the next round. Everyone must not dare to invest blindly. The competition for high-quality projects is more intense. This is the time to really focus on building the future.

Conclude with a quote from Calvin, who will soon join the Utopia team.

“I believe that DAOs will become the key organizational unit of the Internet. In the future, almost everyone will be in one or more DAOs. It is inevitable, and Will make for a better internet - every market segment will have its own tribe; gatekeepers will lose their power. Human networks will thrive. Utopia is building a rail, a payment rail of the future economy, where all Value will all flow on top of it. And from there, the vision expands further. As the website suggests, "the DAO's operating system". Our goal is to help every DAO reach its fullest potential in every aspect of its operation. "

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