Announcing Upstream’s $12.5M Series A

We’re excited to announce that Upstream has raised a $12.5M Series A, led by boldstart ventures, with participation from Tiger Global, Vayner Fund, Fenbushi Capital, existing investor Ibex Investors, & more.

Ed Sim, Eliot Durbin, and the entire team at boldstart ventures are absolutely fantastic. For 8+ years, they’ve been investors in Upstream, and our previous company, Socialrank. We’re very proud that the team that has believed in us for nearly a decade is doubling down on where we’re headed.

We’re elated to also include Panoramic Ventures, Alpaca VC, Vayner Fund, Red Beard Ventures, Fenbushi Capital, Advancit Capital, 8-bit Capital, Blumberg Capital, Knollwood Investments, Human Ventures, Bloomberg Ventures, The Medici Group (Cozomo de’Medici), Flamingo Capital, Converge VP, Social Leverage, Hannah Grey VC, Taryn Fixel (Liminal VC), Joshua Siegel (Acronym), Ricky Engelberg (CMO at Vistaprint), Michael Shaulov (CEO at Fireblocks), Andrew Steinthal and Chris Stang (Founders of The Infatuation), Kipp Bodner (CMO at Hubspot), Sam Kassoumeh (CEO at SecurityScorecard), Ian Andrews (CMO at Chainalaysis), Rishi Khanna (CEO at Stocktwits), Dan Ciporin (former GP at Canaan), Paul Sethi (Founder at Trajectory Capital Partners), David Breger (Director of Product at Google), Julian Jung (Managing Director at Republic Capital), Laura Gaviria Halaby and Javier Villamizar (Softbank / Zero Aleph), Peter Yard (Founder/CEO at InCountry), Ryan McKillen, Marcy Simon, Mags Kala, and more in this round.

While in beta, the Upstream Collectives product has been used by hundreds. Our competitive advantage is our amazing community that has been with us day-in and day-out over the last 2+ years, giving feedback and feature suggestions. We are a community-led company whose DNA has been community from day one.

Many companies today are starting with a crypto product and trying to build a community. Our crypto product, Upstream Collectives, has been built hand-in-hand with our community who helped guide the direction of the product, as we have heard the requests for paid and premium communities, community chat, and group-wide voting countless times.    

You can check out a walk-through video of the Upstream Collectives product here.

With a DAO’s wallet, voting, chat, proposals, governance, and events all in one place, building an engaged community is easier than ever. No more switching across platforms or piecing together disparate tools.

This month we’re rolling out token gating and dynamic delegation (the ability to delegate portions of your voting power to community members). Over the next several months, we’re working towards supporting multiple chains and currencies.

It's an incredibly exciting time to be building in web3. Currently, there is no market leader in the DAO space. The opportunity is to become the OpenSea of DAOs and help DAOs reach mainstream adoption. Over the next six months, the market will reveal who will become the main player in the DAO market. We intend to be that platform. We do so by growing the category for DAOs (a $10B market estimated to be $250B by 2027), helping web2 users become web3 pros, and making Upstream synonymous with DAOs.

Success is a matter of speed and execution. Luckily, we’ve spent the last two years building a community product that our users love. Building on Upstream’s community product infrastructure, we added voting, chat, and a wallet to create a full-stack, no-code DAO-in-a-box that is easy-to-use.

The use cases for DAOs are exciting, with two specific use cases being especially interesting. We’re seeing demand for a way to add a wallet to group chat of friends who want to pool money to do things together. We also see now as a great moment to help NFT projects build community with a DAO that recognizes their NFTs as membership tokens.

Raising capital is great, but we believe that the winner in this space will be determined by how easy the product is to use and how many people want to use it.

Now it’s up to us to make sure that anyone who considers starting a DAO knows about Upstream and is excited to use it.

We will use the proceeds from our fundraise to continue growing our amazing team, design the most seamless onboarding experience out there, and make sure we’re bringing everyone along into the new world of web3. We will continue investing in our amazing community through events, programming, and content, with the mission to be the human and helpful place to learn about crypto.

Does this sound exciting? Come build the future of transparent, effective, and equitable communities with us. We’re hiring across the board. You can apply for open roles here.

If you want to start a DAO, click here to begin the onboarding process.

To get ramped up in web3, check out our podcast, blog, and Youtube channel where we will continue to share educational content to help bring the next 1M people into web3.

We’re immensely grateful for the hard work of our incredible team and the support of our community. The best is only yet to come. Thanks for being with us every step of the way!

— Alex Taub & Michael Schonfeld