NFTPort, the startup providing a one-stop & developer-friendly NFT infrastructure is today announcing the closure of its Series A funding round which raised $26M.
This funding round was co-led by Taavet+Sten, the investment vehicle of Taavet Hinrikus (co-founder of Wise) and Sten Tamkivi, alongside Atomico. Sten will join the NFTPort team as a co-founder while fellow investor Rain Johanson, Bolt’s former CTO, will join as the newly-appointed CTO and co-founder. NFTPort’s additional investors include Filecoin creator Protocol Labs, IDEO CoLab Ventures, Sparkle Ventures, Polygon co-founder Jaynti Kanani, Twilio’s former CTO Ott Kaukver, former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan, and Polkadot’s co-founder Jutta Steiner, among many other backers.
NFT market – just in early stage
NFTs surged in popularity in 2021 as consumers experienced the emergence of burgeoning forms of digital ownership in the sports, art, and fashion industries. This is however only the beginning, with more use cases set to emerge. With NFTs acting as a ‘wrapper’ for any form of data, true digital ownership of assets has been enabled by transferring data from the hands of large data monopolies to individual users.
NFTPort co-founder & CEO Johannes Tammekänd explained the problem with navigating the young digital asset market, “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. 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.”
With demand further increasing as NFTs move beyond images, the already existing supply-side issues will only compound unless addressed. NFTPort hopes to lay the infrastructure that will underpin the ongoing Web3 revolution and enable developers to make the internet owned by citizens through its decentralized NFT infrastructure. The startup’s infrastructure is already enabling developers and companies to bring their NFT applications to market in hours or days, instead of months. This has in turn resulted in vast time and money savings.
“NFTPort’s role is to add meat to these bones, to build the scaffolding in the form of APIs and decentralized protocols for developers to be able to deliver on the promise of a citizen-owned internet,” highlights Sten Tamkivi, Taavet+Sten Partner and NFTPort co-founder.
More than just minting
NFTPort’s infrastructure provides three key pillars required by most companies in order to build NFT products: data APIs, minting APIs & user safety APIs. Data APIs avail access to all NFT data from major blockchain networks Ethereum, Polygon and Solana to enable developers to perform preliminary analyses. The feature also includes data parity with OpenSea.
Minting APIs assist developers to deploy, manage and customise fully owned NFT smart contracts without needing to write even a single line of smart contract code or understand the complex Web3 stack. The result is that many Web2 developers with REST API knowledge can turn digital assets into NFTs in their applications. Finally, NFTPort has offered a counterfeit detection engine for developers to cross-check whether a given NFT has been previously minted on any of its supported chains to increase its user’s safety. All of these pillars combine to provide a ‘Stripe for NFTs’ experience for developers and companies.
NFTPort is already in use by over 30,000 developer teams, including some of the most well-known Web3 companies such as Nifty Gateway and Protocol Labs. As of March 2022, developers making use of NFTPort’s platform had minted over a million NFTs on Polygon which accounted for 10% of all NFTs minted on the Polygon chain.
The Web3 startup was founded in 2021 by Johannes Tammekänd and Kaspar Peterson. Before NFTPort, Johannes oversaw the acquisition of Payload-Security to CrowdStrike on top of founding two AI-based startups. His blockchain experience goes back to 2014 while researching Tor and Bitcoin’s security model in NATO. Kaspar on the other hand is a technical co-founder who co-founded two other start-ups alongside Johannes prior to NFTPort.
This investment will empower NFTPort to double down on scaling its core product, bringing to market its decentralised NFT infrastructure protocol. The Tallinn-based startup will use its funding round to further develop its NFT infrastructure offer and be an enabler of the next phase of digital ownership on the internet.
