At the beginning of 2022, Apollo Capital, along with Caleb & Brown, Virtually Human Studio (ZedRun) and Holger Arians (CEO of Banxa) founded a plan to create a crypto-native investment DAO for incubating local talent to support the next generation of Web3 projects in Melbourne. Today, that project is in fruition as Upside DAO. 

Upside DAO is a private investment DAO comprised of Australia’s brightest crypto founders as members. It will make investments, provide a physical co-working space, connect founders of successful projects and businesses, consult crypto projects, and host exclusive events. Its sole purpose is to support Australian founders in building global Web3 organisations with the support of successful existing founders.

To kick start operations and investments, Upside DAO raised $5 million into a unit trust from its founders and DAO members, including Apollo Capital. The DAO members have already formed specific work groups relating to their areas of expertise within Web3, e.g. DeFi, NFT and GameFi. Upside DAO has made five early-stage Web3 projects. 

The physical workspace is also humming with DAO members, Web3 businesses and a few projects within the DAO’s portfolio. These entities include Apollo Capital, Mirror Planet, Helix Collective, Possible Ventures, Perion, Solv Protocol, Cadena Legal and ZedRun. On the 21st of October, Upside DAO held their launch party to celebrate a successful raise and opening with most of the DAO members in attendance and the wider Australian Web3 community.

Upside DAO launch party in Cremorne

 

On top of a physical space to work in and local capital investments directly from Australia’s Web3 founders (DAO members), Upside DAO also offer exclusive coaching, consulting and connections from the members of the DAO, giving new projects the best opportunities to succeed in their DeFi, DAO, GameFi, Metaverse, Web3 Tooling or infrastructure protocol. By forming as a DAO, Upside DAO can manage its community of DAO members to organise, pool and unambiguously deploy capital to investments using a blockchain. Unlike a traditional corporation, Upside DAO avoids centralised leadership and uses tokens to represent member voting rights.

Australia has established itself as a global leader in the crypto start-up ecosystem, with early projects like Synthetix, Rocket Pool, Ren, THORchain, Immutable, Illuvium and more recently Stepn all managing to achieve billion-dollar market caps during their lifecycle. As a founding member of Upside DAO, Apollo Capital is ‘doubling down’ on the future success of crypto start-ups in Australia through active involvement in governance and a physical presence on the incubator floor. Apollo Capital will be working alongside, consulting to and investing in all of the next-generation Australian projects soon to shape the Web3 world.

 

Upside Social Channels 

https://twitter.com/0xUpside

https://www.upsidedao.com.au/

 

Press

AFR: This Fund Just Raised $5m To Solve Crypto’s ‘Warped’ Model

Australia’s Leading Web3 Founders Launch Upside DAO with $5M in Funding

Australia’s Web3 Founders Introduce Upside DAO with $5M in Funding

Australia’s Leading Web3 Founders Launch Upside DAO with $5M in Funding

Upside Raises $5M To Back Web3 Talent

Apollo-Backed Web3 Fund UpsideDAO Raises $5 Million

Upside DAO获得500万美元战略投资