NFT-focused holding company raises $50M Series A

Nonfungible token projects have raised billions of dollars in venture funding over the past year, underscoring heightened demand in the sector.

Digital asset curator Metaversal announced Tuesday that it has completed a $50 million funding round to further expand its investment capabilities in the nonfungible token (NFT) and metaverse sectors. 

The Series A funding round was co-led by investment firms CoinFund and Foxhaven, with additional participation from Collab+Currency, Dapper Labs, Digital Currency Group, Franklin Templeton, Rarible, Theta Blockchain Ventures, Galaxy Vision Hill and others.

Metaversal said it will use the funding to expand its NFT-focused business, including acquiring high-profile digital collectibles and supporting projects that are being bootstrapped by its venture studio. The funding also enabled Metaversal to secure partnerships with NFT platform Rarible and Dapper Labs’ Flow blockchain. Flow, which provides the infrastructure for NBA Top Shot and CryptoKitties, is also being supported by Google and Filecoin, among other notable partners. 

Related: Square Enix CEO reveals plans for blockchain, metaverse, NFTs

NFTs were a major factor behind crypto and blockchain’s mainstream success in 2021. The sector generated over $14 billion in sales during the year, with digital art collections and digital collectibles accounting for 91% of transactions, according to industry data. While digital art has largely dominated the NFT market to date, that could soon change with the arrival of music NFTs and fashion-focused collectibles.

Venture funds have also identified NFTs as a major growth vector and have funded projects in this space to the tune of $2.1 billion as of Q3 2021. Silicon Valley venture firm Andreessen Horowitz was responsible for nearly 40% of NFT-focused deal activities, according to PitchBook. As Cointelegraph reported, venture funds invested over $17 billion into crypto- and blockchain-focused startups in the first 10 months of 2021, which was more than three times the amount in all of 2020.