Quick take:
- OP3N has completed a $28 million funding round led by Animoca Brands.
- The Series A round also attracted participation from Dragonfly Capital, Avalanche’s Blizzard Fund, Warner Music Interactive, and Connect Ventures, among others.
- OP3N is building a web3 Superapp dubbed “Whatsapp and Amazon for web3”.
OP3N has announced a $28 million funding round led by Animoca Brands. The fundraising also attracted participation from Dragonfly Capital, SuperScrypt, Creative Artists Agency and New Enterprise Associates’ Connect Ventures, Republic Crypto, Avalanche’s Blizzard Fund, Galaxy Digital and Warner Music Interactive. The latest fundraising now values OP3N at about $100 million.
The web3 AI-powered platform is building a new app that blends features of social media with e-commerce. Speaking to TechCrunch on Tuesday, Jaeson Ma, co-CEO of OP3N “I wanted to make a connection for creators, chats and commerce in one place,” calling it “a web3 version of WhatsApp meets Amazon, or WeChat meets Alibaba.”
Dubbed a web3 Superapp, OP3N’s chat-based product wants to integrate web3 into web2-friendly interfaces, bridging the gap between the two iterations of the internet.
The app will enable users to add audio, video and mixed media content while leveraging on-chain data for a “one-stop” experience.
According to Ma, the inspiration behind OP3N’s latest product is driven by the need to access web3 experiences through web2 interfaces. This allows creators to share NFT-gated experiences with their fans through different price points, added Ma.
Users can easily sign-up via e-mail with the app immediately creating crypto wallets for them, which can then be used to access on-chain assets.
Ma says his dream is that in a few years, OP3N’s Superapp will become a “decentralized Facebook, YouTube, Spotify or WhatsApp for web3.”
The company previously raised $10 million in a round backed by the likes of Goodwater Capital, Soma Capital, 500 Global, WhaleShark, Twitch co-founder Justin Kan and The Sandbox co-founder and COO Sébastien Borget, among others.
OP3N will use the fresh funding to expand its leadership team and accelerate the development of its Superapp, said Ma. According to Ma, the product is currently in beta mode where it has been tested with different communities.
Ma wants to use OP3N’s Superapp to bridge web2 and web3 in an easily understandable way, given the complex nature of web3. “It’s not going to happen overnight that a billion people will know how to download a wallet and use it, so we are solving for that.”
The company witnessed first-hand just how complicated it can be trying to onboard non-crypto native users to web3.
“Through our learnings in version one, we realized when we did [an NFT drop], fans didn’t know the difference between AVAX, Solana, Polygon or whatever cryptocurrency it was,” Ma said. “Just that one experience caused so much friction and fallout.”
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