About Umia
The operating stack for token-native ventures
Umia is a platform for launching and operating token-native ventures. A founder can go from a project to a legally formed, token-issuing, community-governed venture in days: legal entity, token, treasury, fundraising, and governance included.
Why Umia Exists
Small teams with the right tooling now ship production software in days. A solo founder can run product, infrastructure, analytics, and marketing through agents. The speed of building has changed completely.
Venture formation has not. Legal structure, fundraising, and governance still assume months of negotiation, quarterly board meetings, and paper-heavy processes. SAFEs were designed for a world where startups iterated slowly. Traditional governance assumes a small group of investors makes the strategic calls.
This mismatch creates three problems:
- Capital is slow. Raising a seed round takes 4-6 months. By the time you close, the market has moved.
- Governance is low-signal. Advisory boards give opinions without consequences. There is no mechanism to separate conviction from noise.
- Incentives are misaligned. Most investors are not deeply committed to your long-term vision. Founders spend energy managing relationships instead of building.
Umia replaces this with a method of capital formation and governance that matches the speed at which ventures actually operate.
Core Components
Tailored Auctions
Umia's onchain fundraising mechanism, powered by Uniswap's Continuous Clearing Auctions (CCA). Founders customize their token launch with audience targeting via zkTLS, allocation caps, refund logic, and oversubscription handling. Price discovery runs fully onchain over a 7-day window, and proceeds automatically seed a Uniswap V4 pool.
Decision Markets
After launch, strategic decisions are made through futarchic decision markets: prediction markets that price the expected outcomes of proposed actions.
Traders buy and sell conditional tokens based on how they think a decision will affect the venture token's value. The proposal with the higher implied value wins, and the treasury contract executes the decision. Losing markets unwind, and traders redeem their tokens as if no trade happened.
The following actions can be executed using decision markets:
| Decision Type | Function |
|---|---|
| Token minting and burning | Mint or burn tokens to raise funds, pay management, or set up joint ventures. |
| Team compensation | Pay packages tied to token price milestones, with portions vesting as the token appreciates. |
| Treasury spending | Approve spending above the monthly disbursement limit. |
| Acquisitions | Propose partnerships, joint ventures, or new business relationships. |
| Strategic pivots | Change the operating agreement, restructure the organization, or shift direction. |
| Company liquidation | Liquidate the treasury and shut down the organization. The last resort for tokenholders to protect their investment. |
Legal Framework (Umia SPC)
Every venture is established under a Cayman legal wrapper built on the MetaLex BORG framework. Decision-making authority is delegated to an onchain treasury smart contract, not the founding team. This gives projects legal personhood for contracts and operating agreements, while ensuring tokenholders have real, enforceable governance rights.
No legal setup fees and no paperwork. The IP, operating team, and treasury all sit under one entity.
This is possible through the Umia SPC (Segregated Portfolio Company). As a SubCo, there is no cost to set up the company, while it still has full legal personhood. If desired, the company can spinoff independently in the future.
The Hybrid Governance Model
Umia's governance gives founders full operational control while giving the community real economic influence over strategic direction:
- Operational leadership stays with the founder. Day-to-day decisions (product direction, agent management, shipping) are not subject to market approval.
- Strategic decisions go to decision markets. Token minting, treasury spending, team compensation, acquisitions, pivots, and liquidation are all resolved through markets.
- The community acts as a board of directors, not a C-suite. They set guardrails and validate direction, but don't run operations.
The Third Path
Most founders face a tradeoff: raise quickly but lose control (DAOs), or retain control but sacrifice community alignment (traditional equity). Umia offers a third path: full operational control for founders, with the community governing strategic decisions through markets.
Noncustodial Treasury
The treasury lives onchain, governed only by decision markets. The founding team has neither custody nor control. An automatic monthly disbursement covers development and operating costs, and any other treasury change requires a governance proposal resolved within 72 hours.
Who Is Umia For?
Founders who want to raise from their community and give them real ownership from day one. If you have a project and a vision, Umia gets you from idea to funded venture in days, with legal structure, treasury, and governance built in.
Community members and traders looking for early participation in ventures where their capital directly shapes strategic direction. Through decision markets, participation is economically motivated: you profit by being right about which decisions will increase token value.
Liquid funds seeking early, structured exposure to ventures with real governance rights and noncustodial treasury guarantees.