Tallinn, Estonia-based NFTPort, an NFT infrastructure company, announced on Wednesday that it has secured $26M (€24.8M) in a Series A round of funding co-led by Taavet+Sten, the investment vehicle of Taavet Hinrikus and Sten Tamkivi, and Atomico.
As a part of the funding, Sten Tamkivi will join the team as a co-founder, and Rain Johanson, former CTO of Bolt, will join as CTO and co-founder.
Other investors, including Filecoin creator Protocol Labs, Sparkle Ventures, IDEO CoLab Ventures, Polygon co-founder Jaynti Kanani, former Twilio CTO Ott Kaukver, former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan, and Polkadot co-founder Jutta Steiner, and many other founders, participated.
The company says it will use the funds to scale its core product and bring a decentralised NFT infrastructure protocol to the market.
“When a company decides to build their NFT infrastructure today, it would either have to expend significant sums of money for scarce web3 developers, or invest time upskilling a web2 developer to carry out the work. Managing constantly evolving blockchain technology quickly becomes a multi-million dollar problem for most companies wishing to build their own NFT infrastructure; like accepting payments online pre-Stripe or building a tech-based product pre-cloud,” said NFTPort CEO and co-founder Johannes Tammekänd.
“Demand will only increase further as NFTs move beyond images, which will compound pre-existing supply-side issues. Our infrastructure enables developers and companies to bring to market their NFT applications in hours or days, instead of months and thus save hundreds of thousands of dollars,” he adds.
NFTPort: What you need to know
Founded by Johannes Tammekänd and Kaspar Peterson in 2021, NFTPort’s infrastructure provides the three key factors needed to build NFT products – Data APIs, minting APIs and user safety APIs.
Data APIs provide access to all NFT data from Ethereum, Polygon and Solana, so that developers can get up and running, including data parity with OpenSea, in a day.
Minting APIs allows developers to deploy, manage and customise owned NFT smart contracts without a line of smart contract code (Web3 stack).
NFTPort has built a counterfeit detection engine for developers to cross-check if a given NFT has been previously minted on any of its supported chains, thus increasing user safety.
Currently, NFTPort is used by over 30,000 developer teams, including Web3 companies like Nifty Gateway and Protocol Labs. As of March, 2022, developers through NFTPort had minted over a million NFTs on Polygon, claims the company.
Investor
Based out of London, Atomico invests in ambitious tech founders at Series A and beyond with a particular focus on Europe. To date, Atomico has partnered with over 100 ambitious teams, including those at Klarna, Supercell, Graphcore, Compass, MessageBird, Masterclass, Attentive Mobile, Pipedrive, and Hinge Health.
“We have high conviction in a shift towards increased digital ownership powered by NFT technology, and the potential for NFTs to become a new asset class. However, a lot of the infrastructure required to underpin the widespread adoption of NFTs and other web3 technologies still needs to be built, and this is where NFTPort comes in,” says Atomico Partner Irina Haivas. “We’re energised by the team’s mission to lay the foundations for an internet that is ownable by citizens.”
“I’ve always liked the crispness of definition for web3, the next generation of internet: users can read, write and own information. But it is one thing to talk about vision, and another to build real tools and applications. NFTPort’s role is to add meat to these bones, to build the scaffolding in the form of APIs and decentralised protocols for developers to be able to deliver on the promise of a citizen owned internet,” says Taavet+Sten Partner and now NFTPort co-founder Sten Tamkivi.
