Pinata, an Omaha, Nebraska-based NFT distribution platform, has secured $21.5M in Seed and Series A funding. While Series A was co-led by Greylock and Pantera, the Seed round was co-led by Greylock and Offline Ventures. Additional investors include Volt Capital, Opensea, and Alchemy.
The company will use the funds to invest in its technology infrastructure and to expand the team.
“Legacy tools for creators all serve a great purpose for discovery and awareness but fall short when building an authentic community and earning direct income. In addition, creators need storage capabilities and a fast and powerful way to distribute their content across marketplaces, metaverses, social media, and the internet en masse,” says Kyle Tut, CEO & Founder of Pinata. “Pinata empowers creators of all kinds to serve content at scale without any technical experience required.”
NFT distribution platform
Kyle Tut (CEO) and Matt Ober (CTO) founded Pinata in 2018, bootstrapping the company for the first few years.
The platform lets creators build across any blockchain with tools to manage and serve content with super-fast uploading, streaming, and sharing.
With over 200 server locations worldwide, Pinata’s built-in content delivery network (CDN) lets users serve content quickly, reliably, and securely.
The company’s pinning service supports uploadable content – from videos, images, music, and apps to entire marketplaces – without limits and is tailored to every creator’s preferred content style.
Pinata’srecent features include Dedicated Gateways, enabling creators to have custom branded, private IPFS nodes that fetch content quicker than the public network.
Another one is Submarining, which allows creators to make any content pinned to Pinata (and shared across blockchains) unlockable. With this, users can share exclusive content with their followers based on parameters such as NFT ownership, time-sensitive, geo-location, and more.
Growth and partnership
Last year, Pinata saw strong revenue growth, up 42X year over year. Today, more than 240,000 users worldwide rely on Pinata, up from 104,000 users in January, claims the company.
Pinata works with notable companies like Opensea, DraftKings, Protocol Labs, Yuga Labs, Autograph, and LooksRare, and users have 120M+ files pinned.
The company’s early adopters have used the product to build well-known platforms and web3 projects like Bueno.Art, DappRadar, Curio, Tokenproof, Sound XYZ, and NiftyLit.
“While today’s NFT activity is focused around static .jpeg files, we believe this is just the tip of the iceberg for this technology and that the most interesting applications around NFTs involve richer media,” said Mike Duboe, Partner at Greylock. “Pinata is the most full-featured offering to help creators and marketplaces program more advanced functionality into this media. The team has been refreshingly “anti-hype” since we led the seed round about a year ago and watching their revenue growth has been impressive since then. We are thrilled to lead another round as the team builds mission-critical infrastructure for all NFT projects and platforms.”
“It was clear from the first time I used Pinata’s services that it’s one of the most robust and easy-to-use media storage and distribution platforms for web3 businesses. This is supported by not only their impressive growth in market share but the partnerships they’ve achieved with many of the most recognizable brands in the space,” said Lauren Stephanian, Partner at Pantera Capital. “We’re so excited to partner with Pinata and co-lead this round alongside Greylock. We look forward to seeing the positive impact Pinata will have on many of the teams building in crypto.”
