Justin Kan’s Gaming NFT Marketplace Fractal Secures $35M Seed Funding
The round was led by venture firms Multicoin Capital and Paradigm
Source: Fractal
key takeaways
- Participants include Andreesen Horowitz, Solana Labs, Animoca and Coinbase
- Fractal currently has roughly 17 full-time employees
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.
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.
Start your day with top crypto insights from David Canellis and Katherine Ross. Subscribe to the Empire newsletter.
Explore the growing intersection between crypto, macroeconomics, policy and finance with Ben Strack, Casey Wagner and Felix Jauvin. Subscribe to the Forward Guidance newsletter.
Get alpha directly in your inbox with the 0xResearch newsletter — market highlights, charts, degen trade ideas, governance updates, and more.
The Lightspeed newsletter is all things Solana, in your inbox, every day. Subscribe to daily Solana news from Jack Kubinec and Jeff Albus.