OpenSea Launches New Investment Arm and Grants Program
The initiative will be led by OpenSea co-founder Alex Attalah. In addition to the capital, it will also offer access to company leadership and to its own venture partners, which include Andreessen Horowitz, Katie Haun, and Electric Capital, among others.
As for the new investment arm, the project will focus on four key themes including the 'shift to a multi-chain world' for both fungible and non-fungible tokens, new NFT protocols, Web3 gaming, and social projects, and NFT aggregators that support both OpenSea and other marketplaces.
"We hope that OpenSea Ventures will provide Web3 developers and NFT creators around the world with the resources they need to build new decentralized economies that give creators, developers, and consumers greater freedom and ownership," the firm said.
In addition, OpenSea's new grants program is slated to provide funding, advice, technical advisory, and strategic connections to the investment arm's.
With the new venture arm, OpenSea follows in the footsteps of US-based crypto exchange Coinbase, whose investment arm, Coinbase Ventures, participated in the NFT marketplace’s $2 million seed round in 2018.
OpenSea recently closed a $300 million Series C funding round led by Paradigm and Coatue which resulted in the company’s valuation hitting $13.3 billion.