What Is a "Labs" Company, Actually? A Category of One

Han Verstraete and Anton Kouprianov define the entity every Web3 project ends up needing, whether or not they planned for it.

"Labco" has become a category of one — shorthand for a project's developer company, usually owned by the leads who are the brain and the vision behind it. Maker did this properly at scale, with multiple contributing units dotted around the world feeding into what's now the Sky protocol. That's the original, purer vision of a decentralised project: a foundation, a community of token holders, and a constellation of independent contributor companies.

You need an entity, full stop

You can't escape needing one. You need a debit card and a US-dollar bank account to pay for your Google Workspace, your domain, your subscriptions, your GitHub Enterprise seat, your Claude or Cursor subscription. None of that runs cleanly out of a Cayman or Panama foundation — foundations aren't built for day-to-day operational spend. So you need a standard, unremarkable operating company — the tax jurisdiction genuinely doesn't matter much at this stage — controlled by the leads, where the actual work gets done and paid for.

Where you base it depends on one question: is VC coming in?

If you're not taking outside equity, the Labco can be lean: you as an employee of your own DevCo, a couple of contractors, maybe a second hire, fully controlled by the team. Simple.

The moment VC money enters the picture, the calculus changes. VCs want value to crystallise somewhere they can eventually monetise — an exit, a stake that's worth something concrete. They'll hold tokens too, sure, but they want the real value built inside a C-Corp they can see a path out of. That's typically Delaware, for the same reasons it comes up everywhere else in this series: precedent, familiarity, a legal system investors already trust.

So when someone comes to Otonomos and says "I need a Labco," the very next question is: are you taking VC money? Everything else — jurisdiction, entity type, how the paperwork gets structured — follows from the answer.