This is an example of a privately held, publicly traded funds, utilizing the DAO model to anonymize ownership, among other possible reasons.  IMHO, things like BitDao are not things that most people can or should invest in.  

Status:

Just skimming the litepaper.  Not going too deep into this.

Litepaper:

https://docs.bitdao.io/ - TL;DR - This is a somewhat decentralized VC for crypto projects - regular financing comes from Bybit, an exchange registered in the British Virgin Islands, made for professional traders that offers massively leveraged trading - average folk do not use ByBit, pro active traders surely do.

https://docs.bitdao.io/litepaper-1/tokenomics - I would need to verify that this distribution didn't change, but it looks like they distributed more than half of DAO voting tokens (BITs) to ByBit.  The rest went to investors like Peter Theil and large projects like Sushi in a private sale.  No public sale.  Treasury distributions are controlled by BIT token votes.

https://docs.bitdao.io/partners/bybit-pledge - ByBit pledges to place 2.5% of it's futures volume, or what looks like something around 25% of their revenue from futures products, into the BitDAO treasury, probably monthly.  That's got to be a lot of cheese.

Overall, this looks like a pretty ambitious "decentralized" VC, with a majority of voting power in the hands of a single company, that will receive an f-ton of treasury funding from that company on a regular basis, and will buy into a lot of crypto projects.  They do plan to hire a lot of devs and help their investment companies, taking tokens from them in return.

BitDao might be a good thing - I'm not sure - but I'm pretty sure that if you wanted to control billions through an organization that is not a legal entity, this setup would be pretty good - it would at least give you a way to hide the fact that the system is totally under your control - depending on how tokens were mixed, you could, of course, make it very hard to determine if any one person is actually controlling votes.  Hiding centralization behind a veneer of decentralization could be a good way to escape some regulation.

Although the litepaper mentions a BitDAO protocol, I didn't get much of a sense of it from the litepaper.  If BitDAO continues to come up, I'll have to learn more.