DEP 3 is inviting social-impact projects to join the cohort as participant-proposed DAOs. If you have a solution that already works and a community it serves, a DAO can become a new channel to grow it — a way to develop the work and scale its impact by bringing your solution further into people's lives through community.

What We’re Offering

For three selected projects, Cohort 3 builds a DAO around each one — a team, resources, and a way of working — so the project gains a new channel for business development and for scaling its impact. The project stays what it is; the DAO is something it gains alongside it, run by members recruited to align with its mission.

The DAO is not a restructuring of your project. It is a channel your project gains — people and infrastructure dedicated to carrying your solution further into the community.

Who We’re Looking For

We are looking for projects that are ready to scale, not projects still searching for their idea. Three criteria matter:

•   An innovation solution in hand. You have a solution that already works — a real innovation in use, not a concept or a plan. DEP 3 is about scaling what works, so your solution should already be doing its job for real people.
•   Regeneration proven. Your project has shown it can regenerate value, not only spend it — it has some proven way of sustaining itself, so the cohort is about growing that, not discovering it.
•   A local community. Your solution serves a real community, and that community is part of how it grows. The DAO scales impact through community, so a living community around your work is essential.

If that describes your project, DEP 3 is a chance to take what you've built and reach further with it.

What a Selected Project Gains

Each selected project gains a DAO and everything it needs to run — grouped in three kinds of value.

A team and a channel

•   A dedicated team. A DAO of around 10–20 members, recruited to align with your mission and bring relevant experience
•   A growth channel. A new channel for business development and for scaling impact — reaching further into people's lives through community, rather than through paid channels alone

Resources to scale

•   Seed funding. $3,000 in seed funding from Kambria — starting capital for scaling impact, not a loan to be repaid. It is the DAO's to spend, transparently through the framework, on the agreed collaboration that scales your project — not a cash grant paid to the project itself
•   Infrastructure. The Kambria DAOs Framework — receiving, splitting, and paying out value transparently and automatically
•   A way of working. The Owned Lanes model, ready to use — Launch Kits, templates, and a clear way of organising the work so members own outcomes

Experience and access

•   Learning the DAO model. The experience of running your project as a DAO — trying the model hands-on, guided throughout by Kambria's DAO Facilitators
•   Ecosystem and visibility. A place in the Kambria open-innovation ecosystem, and visibility through Kambria's channels and community, including its ambassador network
•   Network and partnerships. A cohort of other DAOs to learn alongside, and the chance to pursue the partnerships and sponsorships that serve your project

No prior experience with Web3 or DAOs is needed — onboarding and the DAO Facilitators guide you and your members through the tools. What onboarding cannot solve, though, are a few practical conditions your project and its members need to have in place from the start.

What Needs to Be in Place

DEP 3 runs online and uses cryptocurrency for transparent payments, so two practical conditions matter — and they are worth checking before applying, since they are not things onboarding can fix later:

•   Reliable internet access. You and your members can get online reliably enough to take part in an online cohort — the weekly check-ins, the syncs, and the day-to-day work all happen over the internet.
•   Cryptocurrency is not banned where members are. The cohort pays contributors in cryptocurrency (USDT) and uses crypto wallets. This doesn't require crypto to be formally regulated where your members are — a place without settled crypto law is fine — but it does mean cryptocurrency must not be banned there. 

If you're unsure whether these conditions are met for your project or community, tell us when you apply.

Your Team’s Place in the DAO

Your project's own team is welcome in the DAO. Your knowledge of the solution and the community is part of what makes the DAO work, and members are recruited around you to scale it together — so you take full part: owning lanes, contributing, and voting.

The DAO is built to be community-governed, though, so that it grows as a genuine channel rather than an extension of the original team. To keep that real, your team's place in the DAO has one boundary: together, the project's own people make up no more than the DAO's quorum threshold — currently 34% of the DAO. Within that, you take part fully; what the boundary ensures is that no governance decision can be carried or blocked by the project team alone — a valid decision always needs the wider membership too.

This is less a limit on your involvement than a protection for the very thing you're joining the cohort to build: a community that owns the work alongside you, and can carry it onward on its own.

What We Ask of a Project

•   Bring what you have. Bring your working solution and your community into the cohort, and be ready to grow them through it
•   Take part. Take part in the cohort's rhythms — running the DAO through Owned Lanes, the weekly check-ins, and the All-DAOs Syncs
•   Work in the open. Run the DAO transparently on the shared framework, so value and progress are visible to everyone
•   Experiment openly. Approach it as a genuine experiment — try the model, document honestly what works and what doesn't, and share what you learn

How to Apply

The Call for Projects runs from September to November 2026. We expect to select three projects for Cohort 3.

1.   Apply. Submit an application describing your project — the solution and the innovation behind it, evidence that it works and can sustain itself, the community it serves, and why you want to scale it through a DAO.
2.   Review and conversation. Kambria reviews applications against the three criteria, with a conversation to understand your project, whether the cohort is a good fit, and what a DAO could concretely do to help you scale — so a clear, workable collaboration direction is shaped together, and it's understood that the seed funding is capital for that collaboration rather than a grant to the project.
3.   Selection. Three projects are selected — chosen for fit, from a place of choosing well rather than filling slots.
4.   Onboarding. Once selected, a DAO is built around your project: members are recruited to join it, and the DAO is onboarded into the cohort ahead of execution.

After Selection

Selected projects move into the cohort with the other DAOs. In the Onboarding phase, members are set up and organised into lanes, the DAO writes its master plan — defining its own scopes, lanes, and goals — and the whole cohort comes together at the Kickoff. From there, execution begins.

The Program Timeline page shows how the whole cohort unfolds, and the How It Works page describes the process in full.