“Calaxy is social media…built different.” With $26M funding which is also representative of its co-founder’s NBA jersey, the open social marketplace built for creators can even better reinvent the way celebrities and fans interact. This is not only a cash-for-growth investment, but it adds the strategic partners Polygon who featured in the round co-led by The HBAR Foundation and Animoca Brands.
“$26 million seems fitting in honouring my business partner Spencer -a number he wears with pride in his basketball career,” stated Calaxy’s co-founder & newly appointed CEO Solo Ceesay referring to his co-founding partner & Dallas Maverick player Spencer Dinwiddie. The fresh capital will be vaulted to help weather the bearish days ahead, eventually being used to expand its platform and products.
The Calaxy Social Media dApp
Otherwise known as “Creators Galaxy”, Calaxy, since its founding in 2020 has existed with the aim of reimagining how people use social media, consequently empowering more meaningful and fulfilling fan experiences. The dApp hands creators the ultimate toolkit to interact with their fans in one place, rewarding fans for their engagement.
Calaxy is described as an application layer open social marketplace built by creators, for creators. The platform features a sleek design and intuitive interface like legacy social media platforms, except packing a more powerful punch owing to Web3’s leading distributed ledger tech – the Hedera Hashgraph.
The Hedera network is a blockchain alternative that harnesses the might of the hashgraph consensus algorithm. The Creator’s Galaxy Foundation, enabled by the Hedera network aims to help usher in the future of personal monetization, empowering the next generation of content creators to achieve financial freedom without opting for the route to third parties. The result has been a digital experience that is setting a new industry standard for how creators and fans engage within a more interactive and equitable framework.
Investor Yat Siu, Animoca Brands’ co-founder and Executive Chairman highlighting Calaxy’s value remarked, “Social networks in their current form grant the user minimal rewards, and Calaxy seeks to flip this model over to drive greater benefits to the user. With its strong leadership and by mediating personalized fan experiences through Web3 while including digital collectibles in those experiences, we believe that Calaxy could become one of the shining stars of tomorrow’s social media landscape.”
A change in the leadership structure & further guidance
After serving as COO since 2020, Solo Ceesay has just been appointed CEO. He will succeed Spencer Dinwiddie who will serve as Calaxy’s Executive Chair. Solo adds first-class financial experience to his new role. By steering capital inflow from strategic investors into the Calaxy project, Solo hopes to cement an alternative revenue framework for Calaxy’s community of beloved Creators. Leveraging his past work experience as a Securitization Investment Banker on Wall Street and a graduate of the Wharton School of Business, Solo will work to make money move, ensuring that value is rightfully redirected back into the hands of Creators.
“My appointment to CEO and the success of this raise is evidence that blockchain is paving the way for greater global equitability, and highlights what can be accomplished as a 27-year-old black man -decentralized technology will break the barriers that legacy finance has cultivated,” stated Solo Ceesay with regards to his promotion.
The Creator’s Galaxy protocol which is built on a decentralised & permissionless protocol with open-source governance already has a total coin market cap of over $500M. The protocol is powered by the $CLXY token following their minting in April 2022, supplying 1Billion tokens. The recent successful public and private sale of the $CLXY token not only provides greater distribution of protocol governance within The Creator’s Galaxy but will also accelerate growth and support the ecosystem’s expansion ahead of the highly anticipated launch of the Calaxy App this summer.
The LA-based startup’s last raise was in 2021 and was $7.5M seed funding supported by Animoca Brands and featured the NFL star Ezekiel Elliott, The Bachelor’s Matt James, Jonathan Padilla, the former Head of Blockchain Strategy at PayPal; NFL player Larry Ogunjobi and NBA coach Luke Walton.
