NFT Infrastructure Startup NFTPort Raises $26M Series A to Solve Pain Points of App Developers

The Estonia-based startup provides APIs and decentralised protocols for developers to build NFT applications.
Image source: NFTPort

Quick take:

  • The round was co-led by Atomico and Taavet+Sten.
  • NFTPort is already being used by over 30,000 developer teams.
  • Over a million NFTs have been minted on Polygon using NFTPort.

Estonian NFT infrastructure startup, NFTPort, today announced that it has raised $26 million in Series A funding, co-led by Atomico and Taavet+Sten. The latter is the investment vehicle of Taavet Hinrikus and Sten Tamkivi. 

Hinrikus is the cofounder of fintech company, Wise, while Tamkivi co-founded Teleport, a startup that helps digital nomads to find the best places to live and work. As part of the deal, Tamkivi will join NFTPort’s team as a cofounder, alongside Rain Johanson – the former chief technology officer of rideshare company Bolt – who is joining as CTO and also cofounder.

Additional investors in the round include Filecoin creator Protocol Labs, Sparkle Ventures, IDEO CoLab Ventures, Polygon cofounder Jaynti Kanani, former Twilio CTO Ott Kaukver, former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan, and Polkadot cofounder Jutta Steiner.

Founded in 2021, NFTPort builds NFT infrastructure for developers, enabling them to bring NFT apps to market in a shorter period of time. The startup provides data APIs, minting APIs and user safety APIs for developers to build NFT products. 

“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,” commented Atomico’s Irina Haivas.

The new funds will be used to scale NFTPort’s existing core product and launch a decentralised NFT infrastructure protocol. The company also plans to onboard more than 50 new employees over the next 12 months. 

Johannes Tammekänd, NFTPort’s CEO and cofounder said that 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.

“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,” explained Tammekänd. “Demand will only increase further as NFTs move beyond images, which will compound pre-existing supply-side issues.”

NFTPort is already being used by more than 30,000 developer teams and developers have minted over a million NFTs on Polygon as of March 2022 — 10% of all NFTs minted on the Polygon blockchain.

Announcing the fresh funding, the startup wrote in a blog post that it aims to become the new data layer for the Internet with an open protocol that facilitates the flow of ownership on the Internet, just like TCP/IP today enables the flow of free information.

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