OpenSea Backs Latin American NFT Marketplace Minteo in $4.3M Raise

OpenSea Ventures, the venture arm of the world’s largest NFT marketplace, OpenSea has invested in Latin American NFT platform Minteo’s $4.3 million seed round.
Image source: Minteo/Businesswire

Quick take:

  • OpenSea Ventures has invested in Minteo.
  • The Latin American NFT marketplace raised $4.3 million in a seed round backed by Fabric Ventures, Dune Ventures, and CMT Digital among others.
  • The web3 startup is tapping onto a rapidly growing appetite for non-fungible tokens in the region.

OpenSea has invested in Minteo. The Latin American NFT marketplace has raised $4.3 million in a seed round, which attracted participation from OpenSea Ventures, the venture arm of the world’s largest NFT marketplace

The fundraising also attracted participation from open economy-focused venture firm Fabric Ventures, Dune Ventures— a VC that invests in the creator economy, CMT Group’s crypto-centric venture fund (CMT Digital), Impatient VC, Susquehanna Private Equity Investments, SevenX Ventures, FJ Labs, Big Brain Holdings, G20 Ventures, Alliance DAO, Zero Knowledge and several angel investors, TechCrunch reported.

The web3 startup is looking to pounce on the rapid adoption of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) in the region.

An NFT is a digital representation of a music track, a JPEG, an artwork, a collectible or a video clip stored on the blockchain. Since the start of 2021, NFTs have taken the crypto market by storm, becoming one of the most popular buzzwords in the digital economy.

As a result, celebrities, brands and even government organisations have launched products to take advantage of the burgeoning segment of the crypto market.

Europe, Asia and North America were early adopters. But now, other parts of the world seem to be catching up quickly. Latin America’s Minteo rise to a $4.3 million seed round illustrates the rate of growth of the industry in the region.

And as the web3 startup prepares to accelerate the development of its platform following the seed round, some of its early investors will be buoyed by the fact the world’s largest NFT marketplace OpenSea is among the backers. If your plan is to dominate the Latin American NFT market, then there is no better support than receiving backing from the global market leader.

From the perspective of William Durán, CMO of Minteo, the LATAM-based NFT platform is not a direct competitor to OpenSea. Speaking to TechCrunch, Minteo co-founder said: “On OpenSea there’s a bunch of categories, it’s hard to navigate and unless you’re in the top collection it’s hard to reach an audience if you’re a creator.”

“We’re trying to simplify the user experience from the infrastructure part while making it easier for them to access local content on mobile,” added the Cube Ventures mentor and investor.

The company sees its focus on infrastructure as a key differentiator from LATAM-based NFT platforms. In addition, Minteo wants to focus on local talent and brands to drive its community building according to the company CEO Santiago Rodríguez.

Before co-founding Minteo, Rodriguez co-founded Vlipco, a fintech startup focusing on financial payment experiences. The startup was acquired by NYSE-listed Colombian financial services Bancolombian in November 2021 for 10.52 billion Colombian pesos.

“In Latin America, we’re all fun, great dancers and love music and arts. That’s when we realized, what’s taken off in NFTs so far is the cultural communities and that has a huge cultural opportunity for Latin America,” Rodríguez told TechCrunch. “But right now, crypto is difficult to get in the first place…a lot of exchanges don’t work well, only very technical people are using it. Outside of technical circles, usage is currently limited.”

The announcement of the fundraising comes at a time when web3 venture capital funding has slowed compared to preceding months.

According to the CrunchBase tracker, web3 funding stands at about $719 million for Q3 2022. Based on these numbers, web3 startups are likely to raise less than $1 billion in a quarter for the first since Q1 2020.

Stay up to date:

Previous Post

Shemaroo Launches Metaverse Cinema Experience in Decentraland

Next Post

Uniswap Seeking Up to $200M in New Capital at Unicorn Status

Related Posts
Total
0
Share