Justin Kan’s Gaming NFT Marketplace Fractal Secures $35M Seed Funding

Fractal, a gaming NFT marketplace founded by Twitch co-founder Justin Kan, announced a $35 million seed round on Friday. 

The fresh raise, Kan told Blockworks, will go toward staff expansion, specifically building out a partnerships team and making hires that are “engineering and product heavy.”

Kan has not disclosed the startup’s valuation yet. Fractal has roughly 17 full-time employees but does not have an exact headcount plan by year-end.

“Measuring your company by the size of headcount is like measuring your plane by its weight,” Kan said.

“The main priorities are to build great products for the game partners, and then help them with launching their games. We see it as, if we make our partners successful, we’ll be successful.”

Fractal is a Solana-based marketplace for gamers to buy and sell in-game assets or NFTs (non-fungible tokens). 

“The thing that’s going to work in NFTs, just off the bat, I thought was gaming because there’s already a culture of buying digital assets and digital goods, right?” Kan said. “There’s people buying skins and in-game items, worth tens of billions of dollars each year. Putting it on the blockchain as the next evolution was very obvious to me.”

The startup, according to Kan, “helps gaming companies drop these assets and create a market around these assets with their players.”

Last December, a scammer briefly hacked Fractal’s Discord server, stealing $150,000 worth of Solana from users. Kan reimbursed those affected by the incident with his own funds.

Other participants in the financing round include Andreesen Horowitz, Solana Labs, Animoca, Coinbase, Play Ventures, Crossover, Shrug Capital, Position Ventures, Zynga founder Mark Pincus, TerraForm chief executive Do Kwon and podcaster Tim Ferriss.

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