The big hype around NFTs may have died down a bit since the crypto sub-sector took off last year, but that’s not stopping startups from building and raising capital in the space.
Mintoa Latin America-based NFT marketplace, is betting on the digital asset sector to grow in the region after raising $4.3 million in seed funding, the company exclusively told TechCrunch.
Investors in the round include Fabric Ventures, Dune Ventures, CMT Digital, Impatient VC, Susquehanna Private Equity Investments, SevenX Ventures, FJ Labs, Big Brain Holdings, G20 Ventures, Alliance DAO, Zero Knowledge, and various angel investors.
Interestingly, OpenSea Ventures also participated in the round, even though its NFT marketplace is the largest in the space and will technically compete with Minteo.
“In OpenSea there are a ton of categories, it’s hard to navigate, and unless you’re in the top collection, it’s hard to reach an audience if you’re a creator,” William Durán, CMO at Minteo, told TechCrunch. “We are trying to simplify the user experience from the infrastructure side, while making it easier for them to access local content on mobile devices.”
While other NFT marketplaces exist both in Latin America and around the world, Minteo plans to differentiate itself through its infrastructure and focus on working with local artists and brands, among other things, Minteo CEO Santiago Rodríguez told TechCrunch. “So all of this adds up to a very different product at the end of the day.”
Minteo co-founders Sebastian Salazar, Santiago Rodríguez, Javier Lozano and William Durán. Image Credits: Mariana Reyes
“The idea is to work with the best artists in the region, the 40-50 best artists from each country,” Durán said. “They don’t necessarily have to be involved with NFT yet, this can be their front door and we want to help artists get into NFT.”
Minteo is aiming for its beta version to launch next month, Rodríguez said. The platform should be fully available to the public in early 2023.
The capital will be used to build out the platform, incorporate artists from Colombia and Mexico and then, over time, expand to other Latin American countries, Rodríguez said.
In addition to an NFT marketplace, the platform will also have a mobile wallet and fiat access through its “three-in-one product,” Rodríguez said. “No one really needs to know the technicalities, so we kept it simple and built it on mobile because about 70% of Latin American commerce is mobile. People don’t really use desktop computers.”
That being said, Rodríguez said that he is already seeing a lot of interest in NFTs in Latin America.
“In Latin America, we are all fun, great dancers, and love music and the arts. It was then that we realized, what has taken off in NFT so far are the cultural communities and that has a great cultural opportunity for Latin America”, Rodríguez said. “But right now, crypto is hard to come by in the first place… a lot of exchanges don’t work well, only very technical people are using it. Outside of technical circles, use is currently limited.”
In the long term, Minteo expects buying and selling of NFTs to be “as simple as possible, like one-click buying,” Duran noted.
“There are so many things in the future with this,” Rodríguez said. It’s a brand new technology that can change access to anything. Our vision is to continue to build on new use cases and drive real value from NFTs.”
