MetaCartel Ventures

No single individual runs investments. The DAO’s members — called Mages — collectively source, diligence, propose, and vote on every deal. Each Mage has equal governance rights under the Moloch v2 framework. Founders operating within the DAO include Peter ‘Pet3rPan’ of MetaCartel, Ameen Soleimani (creator of Moloch DAO and RAI), and Stani Kulechov (CEO of Aave), but none hold unilateral authority over the portfolio.

Deal flow comes directly from the DAO’s member network of over 60 active builders, investors, and ecosystem leads across DeFi, NFTs, and DAO infrastructure. Members submit proposals to the DAO, which then runs its own diligence. Because many Mages lead or advise prominent protocols — including Audius, Compound, Balancer, and Gnosis — the DAO often sees projects before they reach broader institutional pipelines.

MetaCartel Ventures operates as a for-profit, member-managed Delaware LLC with its governance and treasury controlled by a Moloch v2 smart contract. It functions more like a decentralized venture collective than a single-family office or a traditional GP-led venture firm. There is no single founding family’s wealth behind it; capital and decision-making are distributed across all Mages.

The DAO’s disclosed model focuses exclusively on direct investments into early-stage decentralized applications. There is no public record of the DAO making fund-of-fund commitments or investing in other venture vehicles. Its stated check sizes of $20,000–$100,000 align with direct angel-style positioning rather than LP relationships.

Per the firm’s own materials, MetaCartel Ventures targets pre-company formation and pre-business-model stages. It explicitly states comfort working with anonymous founders, remote teams, and projects anywhere in the world. The DAO aims to be the first check in or the first participant in a project’s DAO, operating at the earliest frontier of crypto-native venture.

The DAO does not publish a formal exclusion list. However, its entire published thesis centers on cryptonative, community-first decentralized applications. Traditional Web2 SaaS, hardware, biotech, and non-tokenized real-world assets do not appear in any disclosed deal activity or member expertise. The concentration of Mages from Aave, Ocean Protocol, Audius, and Gnosis suggests a de facto focus on DeFi, decentralized infrastructure, and tokenized community models.

MetaCartel Ventures was created by the MetaCartel community — a grassroots collective of Ethereum builders and DAO experimenters — as its for-profit investment arm. While MetaCartel itself focuses on ecosystem grants, experiments, and community coordination, MetaCartel Ventures directs pooled capital into early-stage DApps. The two share overlapping membership but serve distinct purposes under the same community umbrella.

The DAO is explicitly structured as a for-profit LLC. Broader MetaCartel community activities include grant-giving and open-source coordination, but MetaCartel Ventures itself does not describe a philanthropic mandate. Legal separation is maintained through the Delaware LLC wrapper, with the Grimoire governing the for-profit entity’s rights and obligations independently of any non-profit community efforts.

The DAO does not publish a co-investment policy, but its Mage network includes numerous investors from other firms — 1kx, P2P Capital, Volt Capital, Zee Prime Capital — creating natural channels for syndication. Individual Mages can bring outside co-investors into a deal on an ad hoc basis. There is no indication of a formalized co-investment program or fee-sharing structure with external GPs.