Dework, which aims to be a combination of Trello and LinkedIn for Web 3, has received $5 million in a seed round led by crypto investment giant Paradigm and early-stage venture capital firm Pace Capital. The fresh capital will help build Dework from its current three-person core team and several contributors, founder and CEO Lonis Hamaili said in an interview with CoinDesk.
Dework is a Web 3-native collaboration tool that allows decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) to organize internal and external teams, manage tasks and bounties in a transparent way, and help new members get started, according to a draft blog post obtained by CoinDesk.
Other investors in the round included former Coinbase Chief Technology Officer Balaji Srinivasan and Polygon founder Sandeep Nailwal.
Dework targets common pain points for DAOs, which can have thousands of members and can't use traditional project management tools like Jira or Linear, which use a pay-per-seat pricing model, Hamaili said. The organizations tend to have overly broad entitlement systems that simply categorize people as "member" and "administrator," which don't necessarily reflect the varying amounts of work, history and trust in the community. Members also can't easily create a clear work profile of their contributions to multiple DAO projects.
On the project management side, Hamaili said DAO communities would like more insight into the work of the core team and the most active contributors. Dework is also concerned with the lack of transparency in the tools, which makes it difficult for new contributors to quickly learn the ropes and join in. .
The platform has been used by a number of well-known DAOs, including OpenDAO, AragonDAO, CityDAO (where Hamaili was the first technical contributor), and ShapeshiftDAO.
"Dework provides Web3 builders with all the tools and talent needed to help ambitious DAOs reach their full potential," Paradigm researcher Anish Agnihotri said in an emailed statement to CoinDesk. "The team has built a decentralized solution to a decentralized set of challenges and we're excited to be part of their journey as they continue to grow and innovate."