Specialist VC portfolio company NFTPort raises $26m Series A round
NFTPort, a crypto startup that provides non-fungible token (NFT) infrastructure for developers, has raised $26 million in a Series A funding round. Taavet+Sten — the investment vehicle of Taavet Hinrikus (Wise co-founder) and Sten Tamkivi (Teleport co-founder) — and Atomico, the European venture capital firm, co-led the round.
As part of the deal, Sten Tamkivi has also joined NFTPort as a co-founder. Rain Johanson, former CTO of Estonian mobility company Bolt, has also joined NFTPort as a co-founder and CTO. Tamkivi and Johanson join NFTPort's existing co-founders Johannes Tammekänd and Kaspar Peterson.
What is NFTPort?
Based in Estonia, NFTPort helps developers quickly build NFT-based applications through its infrastructure. "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," said Tammekand.
Specifically, NFTPort provides three key products: data APIs, minting APIs and user safety APIs. Data APIs enable developers to access NFT data from the Ethereum, Polygon and Solana blockchains "in a day."
Minting APIs, on the other hand, allow developers to deploy and manage NFT smart contracts without writing any code. And user safety APIs act as a "counterfeit detection engine" to cross-check if a given NFT has been previously minted on any of NFTPort's supported chains, thus increasing user safety.
NFTPort says its infrastructure is used by over 30,000 developer teams, including Nifty Gateway, the Gemini-owned NFT marketplace, and Protocol Labs, the company behind Filecoin and other projects.
Protocol Labs is one of NFTPort's participating investors in the Series A round. Other backers in the round include IDEO CoLab Ventures, Polygon co-founder Jaynti Kanani, Polkadot co-founder Jutta Steiner, Checkout.com CTO Ott Kaukver and former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan, who co-founded Teleport with Tamkivi.
Expansion plans
With fresh capital in hand, NFTPort plans to scale its infrastructure and support more blockchains. The firm also plans to build a decentralized NFT infrastructure protocol in the future, said Tammekand.
To that end, NFTPort is also looking to expand its current team of 18 people to more than 50 people in the next 12 months, Tammekand said. The firm will hire across engineering, product and marketing functions.
The Series A round is NFTPort's first fundraise and was closed in March, said Tammekand. He added that it was an equity round and declined to comment on the firm's valuation.
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Image courtesy: https://unsplash.com/@gerandeklerk; NFTPort