Quick take:
- Funds will be used for the continued investment in the platform’s technology infrastructure.
- Pinata supports any form of uploadable content ranging from videos, images, music, apps, to entire marketplaces.
- Notable companies like Opensea, DraftKings, Protocol Labs, Yuga Labs, Autograph and LooksRare are using Pinata’s services.
NFT distribution platform, Pinata, today announced that it has raised $21.5 million in seed and Series A funding. The Series A was co-led by Greylock and Pantera, and the seed was co-led by Greylock and Offline Ventures. Additional investors include Volt Capital, Opensea, and Alchemy.
Pinata provides the media infrastructure for marketplaces, metaverses, web3 apps, and NFT projects across all blockchains. The company will use the funds to continue the investment in its technology infrastructure and expand its team.
The earliest version of the platform was founded by Kyle Tut (CEO) and Matt Ober (CTO) at ETH Berlin in 2018, which won the event’s hackathon. Tut and Ober continued building Pinata out of their hometown of Omaha, bootstrapping the company for the first few years to design product that could withstand NFT hype and grow to meet the increasing needs of web3 creators.
“Legacy tools for creators all serve a great purpose for discovery and awareness, but fall short when it comes to building an authentic community and earning direct income. Creators need storage capabilities and a fast and powerful way to distribute their content across marketplaces, metaverses, social media, and the internet en masse,” says Kyle Tut, CEO & Founder of Pinata. “Pinata empowers creators of all kinds to serve content at scale without any technical experience required.”
Pinata provides a suite of tools to manage and serve content with super-fast uploading, streaming and sharing via 200 server locations around the world, enabling creators to build across any blockchain. Its pinning service supports any form of uploadable content ranging from videos, images, music, and apps, to entire marketplaces – tailored to every creator’s preferred style of content.
The platform’s most recent feature additions include Dedicated Gateways, enabling creators to have custom branded, private IPFS nodes (protocol for storing and sharing content) that fetch content faster than the public network, and Submarining, which allows creators to make any content pinned to Pinata (and shared across blockchains) unlockable. With Submarining, users can share exclusive content with their followers based on parameters such as NFT ownership, time-sensitive, geo-location, and more.
Today, more than 240,000 users worldwide rely on Pinata, up from 104,000 users in January. Notable companies like Opensea, DraftKings, Protocol Labs, Yuga Labs, Autograph and LooksRare are using Pinata’s services, and users have over 120 million files pinned. Pinata’s early adopters include well-known web3 projects such as Bueno.Art, DappRadar, Curio, Tokenproof, Sound XYZ and NiftyLit.
“It was clear from the first time I used Pinata’s services that it’s one of the most robust and easy-to-use media storage and distribution platforms for web3 businesses on the market. This is supported by not only their impressive growth in market share but the partnerships they’ve achieved with many of the most recognizable brands in the space,” said Lauren Stephanian, Partner at Pantera Capital.
Stay up to date:
