FUEL, a Berlin-based technology company, announced on Tuesday that it has announced €1.5M in pre-seed funding to become “Shopify for NFTs.” The investment comes from NYC-based FintechCollective (a shareholder of OpenSea), London-based Seedcamp, and Notion Capital with their pre-seed vehicle, Pioneers.
Additionally, international business angels and experts such as Bitstamp CTO David Osojnik, Gumtree Co-founder Michael Pennington, and Indeed founder Paul Forster, joined the round.
NFT market right now!
NFT (Non-Fungible Tokens) exploded in 2021! According to Nonfungible.com, trading in NFT hits $176.8B last year, a whopping increase of 21,000% from 2020. In an interview with CNBC, Gauthier Zuppinger, co-founder of Nonfungible.com says, “We’ve seen exponential growth over the past year.”
The global NFT market is expected to register a CAGR of 39.6% over the forecast period and revenue is projected to increase from $340M in 2020 to $3,57,316.3M in 2030. According to Emergen Research, increasing NFTs in gaming is one of the major factors expected to drive global market revenue growth. Notably, gaming is one of the most popular applications for NFTs currently. Following the lead of blockchain-first game developers, traditional game developers such as Ubisoft are already experimenting with this technology.
Shopify for NFTs
FUEL was founded by Csongor Barabasi (previously Head of Engineering at Weezy) Thanh Binh Tran (previously led business development at Caroobi), Stefan Tietze (serial entrepreneur, company builder, and business angel), and Patrice Deckert (serial entrepreneur and investor) to bring NFTs further into the mainstream.
“Last year, $25B worth of NFTs were traded globally, up from $95M in 2020, and artists like Steve Aoki, Nas, Grimes, and brands like Lamborghini entered the space. The art establishment also sees value in the space, with brokers like Sotheby’s entering the market”, says Tietze and Deckert, co-Founders of FUEL.
The platform enables creators to build their own custom-branded NFT shop without any technical knowledge required. Consequently, creators can launch, manage and grow their NFT collection using a broad range of tools seamlessly integrated under the roof of the FUEL platform.
The German company aims to bring NFTs into the hands of millions of creators and their fans by allowing customers to buy an NFT as easily as they would buy something in a regular online shop. As per the company’s claims, fans can pay with a credit card instead of worrying about setting up a wallet.
“Even though we see growing adoption, NFTs are still in an early phase. Currently, the barrier of entry for creators is very high. The market has outgrown the basic sales functionality of aggregation platforms like OpenSea, and creators need more tools to succeed in the next phase”, said Barabasi.
The company is already working with “Tomorrowland-DJs Mat.Joe and several other yet-to-be-announced top artists and labels, aiming to launch several NFT drops in the next couple of weeks”, Tran adds.
