We’ve raised $5.6 million to empower leading brands to securely deploy DAO treasuries

We’re excited to announce that Mural has raised a $5.6 million Seed round to enable global brands to deploy DAO treasuries simply and securely.

Our mission is to enable trend-setting brands like Superf3st, the world’s first community-powered music festival from the creator of Outside Lands and Bonnaroo, to store, manage, and deploy DAO treasury funds and execute on their DAO strategy. These early adopters are proactively closing gaps with their communities and developing winning products and experiences.

Why We Started

We launched Mural because we believe every progressive brand will soon be adopting DAOs as part of their innovation process. Like e-commerce in the early 2000s, or domains at the advent of the internet, DAOs represent a paradigm shift in how organizations around the world engage the people that matter most: their community.

Each of the most valuable companies in history, from Apple and Nike to Shopify and Starbucks, have uniquely empowered the most passionate members of their community to champion their products and evangelize their brand. They were able to successfully tap into the pulse of the people that cared most and enabled them to directly guide and promote their brand.

Now, with Web3 technologies at a level of performance capable of unlocking substantial operational improvements in how organizations collaborate, communicate, and compensate, DAOs — infrastructure for communities to earn and build with the brands they love  — are primed for mainstream adoption.

However, brands lack reliable infrastructure for simple, secure, and compliant DAO treasury management. Ineffective security in Web3 has led to malicious attacks and reputational damage. Despite the revolutionary accessibility of blockchain technologies, minimal transparency and simplicity at the user interface level has prevented mainstream adoption. For brands, lack of usability has made it difficult to launch and integrate DAOs into their existing processes — despite overwhelming proof of value.

Our objective with Mural is to empower brands to execute on their DAO strategy with confidence.

Problems We’re Solving

We’ve spent the past year and a half contributing to high-performing DAOs, ranging from the Nouns DAO to Empire DAO, Boston DAO, Bright Moments and more. We’ve felt friction firsthand in the process of distributing funds to DAO contributors…

• “How can I access funds from our DAO’s treasury?”
• “Why does it take weeks of financial maneuvering to pay our DAO’s most committed contributors?”
• “How can we avoid duplicate payouts?”
• “How can we remain fully compliant as we scale?”
• “How can we ensure our contributors are financially well equipped to maximize their impact?”
• “What is the status of funded projects?”
• “How can we ensure complete transparency around how DAO finances are being used?”

We’ve realized that in order for a DAO to scale and unlock groundbreaking value for a brand, custom-fit technology is critical to keeping a DAO’s community and treasury funds in lockstep.

What We’re Building

We’re bringing best in class security and design practices from Palantir and Digits to build well-architected financial infrastructure that brands with the highest degree of performance and compliance requirements can rely on.

To do so, we’re developing Web3 financial software with first-principles architecture and design thinking, in order to deliver a platform capable of bringing DAOs mainstream for the enterprise and onboarding the next billion DAO contributors.

We plan to:

• Solve the most significant financial management problems for leading brands launching DAOs: lack of transparency, security, usability, and trust.
• Make it simple for brands with an established DAO treasury to store, manage, and deploy crypto funds to their community.
• Enable brands to put treasury funds at the fingertips of their brand champions with payouts embedded on their website and socials.
• Equip brands with powerful financial tools to track payouts and manage financial reporting.
• Empower brands to keep their entire community on their DAO’s financial pulse.

And we are fortunate that legendary investors alike share our ambition. Investors in our seed round include Digital Currency Group, Galaxy Digital, 186 Ventures, Firstminute Capital, AlleyCorp, Predictive VC, Global Coin Research, and over 30 world-class builders including Nikil Viswanathan and Joseph Lau (Alchemy), Jeff Seibert and Wayne Chang (Digits), Tom France (Ledger), Rosemary Leith (WWW Foundation), Abbey Wemimo and Samir Goel (Esusu), Itamar Lesuisse (Argent), Ronny Shibley (Gorillas), Joey Santoro (Fei Protocol), Tyler Scriven (Saltbox & Palantir), Valentin Perez (Studio), and many more.

Why Us

We are a diverse, New York City based team hailing from Puerto Rico and France to Togo, Hong Kong, Australia, Colombia and more. We are founders, technologists and community builders that love cultivating delightful experiences and designing, building, and scaling world-class software products.  Our leadership team includes:

• Sinclair Toffa was previously a Technical Lead at Palantir, implementing governance and permissioning systems while deploying the Foundry data platform for Fortune 500 auto-manufacturing, telecom, and media clients in Europe and the US.  Before Palantir, Sinclair led Make School NY, an iOS coding school with 80 students.  In his spare time, Sinclair loves to do breathwork, salsa, and piano - he also helps run a small coding school in Togo, and architects the power grid at his Burning Man camp, F Camp.  Sinclair started in crypto in 2014 through the Duke Blockchain Lab and became an active NFT collector and DAO contributor in 2020.
• Kevin Alvarez Fung previously led product management at Digits, a pioneering fintech that has raised $100M from Softbank & Benchmark to build delightful software for business finance. Before Digits, Kevin was an early team member at Kensho, a fintech building ML tools for traders that was acquired for $600M by S&P Global. Kevin is also the founder of Predictive VC, a venture capital firm which has made institutional investments into over 35 pioneering early-stage companies to date with a top decile track record. He loves running, producing music, and exploring new cuisine around NYC.
• Arthur Kam was previously a Technical Lead at Palantir where he led projects to implement the Foundry data platform for major European and British institutions including the UK’s National Health Service (NHS). Before Palantir, Arthur was a lawyer at law firm Corrs Chambers Westgarth and worked on key M&A transactions with leading banks and private equity firms (Goldman Sachs, Macquarie Capital, KKR, Blackstone). Arthur leads technical architecture, development, and mentorship at Mural and is passionate about cooking, coffee, and endurance sports.

We’re on a personal mission with Mural to unlock financial access for communities worldwide via delightful, impactful software. We fundamentally believe in the impact that DAOs will have on brands and society at large.

Join Us

At Mural, we are obsessed with cultivating a culture of curiosity, ownership, improvement, and entrepreneurial ambition.  We build intentionally and put ego aside in service of the customer.

We are building a global team with electric energy and a passion for Web3.  We would love to hear from you, don’t hesitate to reach out!

Via DM @sinclair_toffa, @kalvarezfung

Join our next cohort - join.mural.xyz

Join our team ~ https://bit.ly/3AeKzv0

View our website ~ mural.xyz

To the people pushing Web3 forward, we are honored to build alongside you.

Learn more about us:

• Coindesk
• The Block
• TechCrunch