By
Chimamanda U. Martha
April 22nd, 2024
According to the company, the raised funds will be used for hiring, product development, startup development as well as improving customer support and safety.
Non-Fungible Token (NFT) marketplace OpenSea has announced to have raised $300 million in Series C funding led by Paradigm and Coatue with participation from new and existing investors. This puts the company at a $13.3 billion valuation from the $1.5 billion valuations after the $100 million Series B in July 2021.
According to the company, the funding will be used for hiring, product development, startup development as well as improving customer support and safety. The NFT marketplace has seen incredible growth since August last year after integrating Polygon to make transactions faster and cheaper. According to DappRader, OpenSea has recorded about 1.6 million Ethereum transactions and $2.4 billion in trading volume.
Founded in 2017 by Devin Finzer and Alex Atallah, OpenSea has established itself as one of the biggest NFT marketplaces with Paradigm managing partner Fred Ehrsam lauding the disciplines of the founders in the last four years for sticking to the vision of NFT as internet and world-changing primitive.
Goals for the OpenSea $300 Million Funding
According to the company’s blog spot, they plan on accelerating product development and user experience. In respect to this, the company has appointed Shiva Rajaraman as their new VP of Product. With an experience as a VP of Commerce for Meta Platforms Inc (NASDAQ: FB), Shiva is said to be passionate about building a new web that rewards creativity and participation with laudable privacy, sustainable economics, and fewer gatekeepers.
“We’re focused on lowering the barriers to entry for NFTs by introducing features and simplified flows that abstract away the complexity of the blockchain. We’re also accelerating our multi-chain support and prioritizing improvements to help people discover, manage, and showcase their NFTs with better tools, analytics, and presentation,” said the blog post.
They also seek to make meaningful community investments. According to OpenSea, they want to expand their NFT ecosystem, and starting from the first quarter of this year, they will launch a grant program to support builders, developers, and creators who make the NFT space meaningful. Also, they will invest in relevant areas to expand their trust, safety, and reliability. It was stated that they will go as far as scaling their customer support, trust, and safety team to over 60 people. Further efforts will be made to more than double the number before the end of the year.
The company disclosed that transactions on the OpenSea marketplace surged by over 600X in 2021, showing the incredible growth of the NFT ecosystem. According to the blogpost, people should expect more.
“But we’re just getting started – and we need to scale our team quickly! If you’re motivated to build the destination for new open digital economies, we are hiring across the board. We couldn’t be more excited about the journey ahead”, said OpenSea.
The success story of OpenSea depicts the growth of crypto venture capital with reports stating that over $30 billion in investments flowed into crypto startups last year.