Tekin Salimi

Tekin Salimi is the founder and managing partner of dao5, a crypto venture firm built to back research-driven founders at seed and pre-seed and, over time, convert into a community-governed DAO. Launching dao5 in 2022, he later unveiled a follow-on vehicle of roughly $222 million, expanding the platform’s capacity to fund Web3 infrastructure, cryptonetworks, and developer tooling while experimenting with shared ownership and governance. Previously, Tekin served as a general partner at Polychain Capital, investing in early-stage protocols and advising portfolio teams on strategy, governance, and token design. Trained as a corporate lawyer, he began his career at Torys LLP in Toronto, where his practice focused on M&A, debt finance, and securities matters. He holds a J.D. from York University’s Osgoode Hall Law School and completed an exchange at the National University of Singapore. He is called to the Bar of Ontario. Tekin’s writing on tokens and organizational design has been published by CoinDesk and Cointelegraph, including the essay “2018 and Beyond: Tokens Are Slowly Eating the Firm.” Beyond investing, he has contributed as an advisor and board observer to industry nonprofits such as the Blockchain Association, and previously advised the Blockchain Education Network. Today he operates from Dubai and invests internationally, with a particular interest in research pipelines that originate in universities and independent labs. He looks for founders with long time horizons, strong ethics, and an appetite to build primitives other builders can compose on. Bilingual in English and Farsi, Tekin enjoys collaborating across cultures and ecosystems, and connecting academics with entrepreneurs. Representative interests include decentralized infrastructure, security and cryptography, onchain data, developer experience, and DAO mechanics. He is a frequent guest on podcasts and industry panels, where he discusses founder incentives, venture portfolio construction in crypto, and how to responsibly decentralize control as networks and communities scale.