SunDAO 2025 in Review: 11 Deals, 4 Investments, and Everything We Learned
By Daiana Marculescu, Co-Founder of SunDAO Ventures
When Chris and I launched SunDAO, we had a thesis - that a room full of validators, security auditors, VCs, and protocol founders could evaluate early-stage blockchain deals better than any single investor. We had conviction. We didn’t have proof.
Now we do. Here’s what a full year of running this machine actually looked like.
The headline numbers
In 2025, we sourced 11 deals across 7 sectors. We invested in 4. We passed on 5. Two more got a yes vote from our members but the founders couldn’t close their rounds - which happens more often in early-stage than anyone likes to admit.
That’s a 36% conversion rate from pipeline to deployed capital. Typical venture funds sit around 1-3%. We’re selective, and we think that’s a feature.
Our members - 70+ experts across 20+ countries - reviewed every single deal. They voted on all of them. And in a space where $2.17 billion was stolen in crypto hacks in H1 2025 alone, having security auditors and validators in the room isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the whole point.
The portfolio
OKcontract - the deal Vitalik noticed
This one still gives me chills. OKcontract is building security-first infrastructure that eliminates blind signing and front-running - two of the most persistent attack vectors in crypto. The founding team are PhD researchers out of Paris Sorbonne, with CISSP certifications and 20+ years in security and product design.
What sealed it for us: Vitalik mentioned them during his ETHCC 2025 keynote. Their enterprise-grade vault infrastructure was already live. And our security auditor members - people who spend their days hunting exactly these vulnerabilities - went deep on the technical architecture and came back convinced.
This is the kind of deal where SunDAO’s model shows its teeth. A generalist VC might have liked the pedigree and moved on. Our members opened the hood.
Index Network - decentralized discovery meets AI
Decentralized discovery via double opt-in matching, privacy-preserving by design. The founders have been building together since 2020, which matters more to me than most pitch deck metrics.
BlueYard and Consensys Mesh were already backing them. The Consensys ecosystem partnership was live. And their network of autonomous Broker Agents showed the kind of technical ambition that gets our protocol founder members excited.
XO Market - prediction markets on a sovereign chain
CEO is a former Head of Web3 at Roche. CTO built at Amazon. They’re running a sovereign chain with Celestia for data availability, supporting any token on any chain, with a market maker design (LS-LMSR) that our more quantitative members spent hours dissecting.
The round was led by Cyber Fund and Delphi Digital, oversubscribed, and came with a Celestia Foundation grant. They won the Celestia Mammothon. And their distribution play - a Telegram bot plus browser extension - is the kind of scrappy growth thinking we look for at pre-seed.
Stealth project - interoperability infrastructure
Veteran team, strong backers, critical infrastructure connecting blockchain ecosystems. That’s all I can say publicly. Full details are available to members.
What we passed on - and I want to be honest about why
Publishing our pass reasons is something no other investment DAO does, as far as I know. We think founders deserve transparency, and prospective members deserve to see how we think. Startup names are anonymized to protect the teams.
A liquid staking play came to us with a strong team and a chain-abstracted approach connecting Ethereum liquidity to PoS chains via IBC. We liked the technical vision. We didn’t like that Lido, Stride, and Milkyway were already entrenched. Timing felt wrong.
An institutional BTC yield product had 100+ years of combined TradFi experience on the founding team. Genuinely impressive people. But they were asking for a $75M valuation at their current stage, and we couldn’t get the math to work. Sometimes the team is right and the price is wrong.
A DePIN project targeting gaming, robotics, and IoT had 50+ partnerships and 40K+ nodes. Ambitious. Maybe too ambitious - the multi-vertical roadmap carried real execution risk, and the valuation didn’t account for it.
A DeFAI trading platform was live with $85M in volume and 100K+ users. Real traction, no question. But the DeFAI space was getting crowded fast, and we had concerns about what differentiation looks like in 12 months.
Two deals we wanted - but couldn’t close
A cross-chain DeFi development environment had a former ICF Board member on the team and $1M committed by Cosmos and Ethereum OGs. We voted yes. The round didn’t come together.
An AI verification L1 blockchain had 15M+ users in 5 months, 250K daily active, a live mainnet, and $2.5M in annualized revenue. Featured in Messari. We voted yes. Same outcome - the round didn’t close.
That’s early-stage investing. Not every conviction turns into a wire transfer.
One company failed. Here’s what happened next.
I debated whether to include this. But if we’re going to talk about transparency, we should actually be transparent.
One of our portfolio companies didn’t make it. The founders are pivoting to a new project - and they’re giving SunDAO equity in the new venture. A second bite at the apple.
That tells you something about the relationships we build. Founders who went through a failure still want us at the table for what comes next. I’d rather have that than a perfect track record with no real relationships behind it.
How the process actually works
I get this question on every intro call, so let me walk through it plainly.
Deals come from the members themselves. Our members are deeply embedded in the ecosystem - they encounter promising startups through their day-to-day work and bring them to SunDAO. If we invest, the member who sourced the deal earns a share of our carry. On top of that, deals come through Chris’s and my networks, and through deal flow exchanges with our VC partners. 70+ sets of eyes sourcing, not just two founders.
Then we put the deal through the machine. Our internal team vets the opportunity and writes a comprehensive investment memo covering 12 dimensions - from problem and team to tokenomics, risks, and our proposed participation. That memo goes to all members. The startup pitches live to the full DAO.
The startup pitches live. Founders present directly to the full DAO. Members ask questions, then stay for a private discussion without the founders in the room. From there, they have a full week to vote - and many use that time to do their own deeper diligence. Voting is fully transparent: everyone sees who voted what, so members can factor in whose judgment they trust before casting or adjusting their own vote.
Everyone votes. Yes or no. We factor member conviction into the final call.
Capital deploys fast. If we proceed, members invest $2,500 to $25,000 per deal. Legal is handled through dedicated SPVs. From presentation to capital deployed: 2-3 weeks.
The caliber of founders pitching us
This matters, and I don’t think we’ve talked about it enough.
The teams we evaluated in 2025 included people from Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Google, Amazon, the Ethereum Foundation, ICF, Oliver Wyman, Roche, BCG, MIT, and Wharton. Our portfolio companies are backed by BlueYard, Consensys Mesh, Cyber Fund, Delphi Digital, and the Celestia Foundation.
We didn’t chase these deals. They came through our network. When you have 70+ technical operators and investors sourcing across 20+ countries, the pipeline builds itself.
What I’d do differently
If I’m being candid - and this is a year-in-review, not a pitch deck - there are things I’d change.
We should have published content like this from day one. We were so focused on sourcing and investing that we forgot to tell anyone what we were doing. That’s a mistake I’m correcting now.
We should have documented member outcomes earlier. The people investing through SunDAO are getting access to deals they’d never see independently, but we haven’t done a good job showing that externally.
And we should have been louder about our pass reasons from the start. The fact that we say no to 64% of deals is one of the most compelling things about SunDAO, and almost nobody knew it until now.
What’s ahead in 2026
We’re targeting 15-20 deals evaluated and 8-10 investments this year. The sectors we’re watching: security infrastructure, AI x crypto, DeFi, interoperability, and a few emerging verticals I’m not ready to name yet.
Our members are already reviewing Q1 2026 deals.
If any of this resonates - if you’re a validator, auditor, fund manager, protocol founder, or operator who wants to invest alongside people who actually understand what they’re evaluating - I’d love to talk.
Memberships are opened for individuals and for institutions. You can join at sundao.ventures or book a call with me directly via our website.
SunDAO Ventures is an investment DAO where 70+ blockchain experts collaborate on due diligence and co-invest in frontier blockchain infrastructure. Founded by former ICF Ecosystem Lead Daiana Marculescu ($40M treasury, 25+ teams) and ICF Technical Director & BIS Lead Architect Chris Zhong.
This post is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.