This month SunDAO hosted the latest edition of its Private Investors Speed Dating, this time fully online. The seats got booked within days of the announcement, and the room we ended up with was one of the strongest we have ever convened.
We have run in-person editions of this format in Cannes and Abu Dhabi. Each one taught us something. This was the first time we ran it as a fully virtual event, and it confirmed what we suspected: the format scales beautifully online, because it lets us put investors from three continents in the same room on the same evening, which is something we could never afford to do in person.
Here is what happened and what we learned.
We had 10 funds represented across the event, each with a distinct thesis. Different cheque sizes, different stages, different geographies.
FBG Capital, one of the earliest and largest crypto investment firms in Asia, with close to a hundred portfolio companies since 2015.
GEM, a $3.4 billion alternative investment group with 530+ transactions across 70 countries, where GEM Digital structures token investments across thirty plus exchanges.
LBank Labs, the $100 million venture arm of LBank exchange, deploying across seven regions with a fund-of-funds layer alongside direct investments.
Edge Ventures and Tokentus, both represented by Mona Tiesler, who was named Web3 Investor of the Year 2024. Edge Ventures is backed by Edge Capital ($600M+ AUM), G1, Allnodes, and WTG. Tokentus is a Frankfurt-based publicly listed Web3 VC investing since 2019.
Cointelegraph Accelerator, the 12-week program from the largest crypto media company in the world, offering up to $100K in seed funding and Demo Day access to fifty plus institutional funds.
Legion, a MiCA-compliant token launchpad backed by VanEck, Kraken, and Coinbase Ventures, with three hundred fifty thousand investors on its rails.
Whitechain, the EVM-compatible Layer-1 backed by WhiteBIT, one of Europe’s largest crypto exchanges, with eight million plus users in its ecosystem.
Token Ventures, a Prague-based fund investing pre-seed and seed in L1s, L2s, DeFi, gaming, and DePIN, with forty plus portfolio companies including Polygon and 1inch.
Dracoon Ventures, a Munich-based Web3 investment DAO that pairs capital with hands-on tokenomics, fundraising, and exchange listing support.
The combined assets under management in that room crossed several billion dollars. More importantly, the combined deal flow they represent is the kind of access a founder normally needs months of warm introductions to assemble.
We are not naming the 7 founders here because the conversations were private and several of them are mid-raise or in stealth. What we can tell you is the range.
Climate finance infrastructure tokenising natural capital.
A reimagining of social media built on attention economics rather than algorithmic farming.
A Layer-1 with a novel consensus mechanism focused on financial applications.
A network turning user intent into an ownable, discoverable asset, with a network state thesis underneath.
A Bitcoin-native protocol building a programmable identity layer.
A community-driven ecosystem reframing how an entire region builds its crypto presence.
And a maritime infrastructure play tokenising real-world assets across global shipping and ports.
Seven founders. Seven completely different theses. Every one of them post-MVP, with real traction, and in or near active fundraise. If you wanted to understand the breadth of what early-stage crypto looks like in 2026, this room was the map.
We had a round-robin schedule in advance so every founder met every investor exactly once. The conversations were timed, structured, and tight enough to force real signal from minute one.
What stood out to me afterwards was how much the investors leaned in.
Several of them messaged me during the session asking for follow-up introductions to specific founders.
Two told me this was the highest concentration of investable companies they had seen in a single sitting all year. One sent his analyst a calendar block for the next morning to start diligence on a project he met that evening.
For the founders, the value was equally clear. Each one walked away with warm conversations and contact details for the investors in the room. Several have already booked second meetings.
There is something about the constraint of structured, time-boxed conversations that produces better outcomes than open networking. Investors get a comparable read across an entire cohort in one evening. Founders get to test their hook in front of ten different audiences, then refine in real time. And because the matchmaking is curated in advance, nobody is wasting a single conversation.
The traditional alternative is months of cold introductions, calendar games, and follow-up loops. This format compresses all of that into one carefully designed evening, with the warm context already in place.
What we have learned from running this in Cannes, Abu Dhabi, and now online, is that the online edition has a unique advantage. We can convene a calibre of investor lineup that would be prohibitively expensive to assemble in person. VCs flew nowhere. The room came to them.
The conversations that happen during the formal session are only half of what makes this work. The other half is what happens afterwards.
Founders walked away with a curated list of ten investors who already know who they are and what they are building. That introduction is worth more than any cold outreach. Investors walked away with a pre-filtered shortlist of seven companies that match a thesis they actually care about. And we, at SunDAO Ventures, walked away with deeper relationships on both sides, which feeds directly into our pipeline.
This is what I mean when I say SunDAO is more than an Investment DAO. The investments are the engine. But the network around them, built deliberately through events like this one, is what makes the engine run.
We are running two upcoming editions, each focused on a specific vertical so that the investor lineup and founder cohort are perfectly matched.
This edition is for AI founders, whether you are building pure AI, applied AI, or anything at the intersection of AI and another industry (Web3, fintech, healthcare, infrastructure, consumer). The investor side will feature a lineup of AI-focused VCs and angel syndicates actively writing cheques in the space.
It runs fully online, so wherever you are in the world, you can join from your desk. If you are an AI founder raising a round, or an investor with an AI-first thesis, the seats are open now and will close once we hit the cap.
Apply here: https://luma.com/ekobo866
This edition is for Web3 founders building across DeFi, infrastructure, stablecoins, interoperability, AI x Crypto, consumer apps, or anything pushing decentralised technologies forward. The investor lineup will include funds, angel syndicates, and strategic allocators deploying capital into crypto.
Also fully online, so founders and investors from every region are welcome to join. If you are a Web3 founder mid-raise, or an investor looking for the next wave of frontier blockchain projects, this is the room to be in.
Apply here: https://luma.com/9w3ev3dg
Founder seats are limited on both editions. We cap the number of startups to keep the investor-to-founder ratio meaningful, which is what makes these sessions work in the first place.
Each edition is one hour of high-signal conversations, delivered entirely online. The right people, in the right room, at the right time.
If you want to be part of the event, apply this week. If you want to be considered for future editions, write to us at hello@sundao.ventures.
The next events will be even sharper than the last one. We will see you there.
SunDAO Ventures is an investment DAO where 70+ experts in blockchain, AI, and emerging tech, collaborating on due diligence to co-invest in frontier tech. Founded by former ICF Ecosystem Lead Daiana Marculescu and ICF Technical Director & BIS Managing Architect Chris Zhong.
This post is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice
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