Metagood, a for-profit social impact NFT startup, has raised $5 million in its pre-seed round, the team exclusively told TechCrunch.
“We launched the company with the concept of using NFTs as an expression where everyone does good things for each other and the good things are tokenized and exchanged,” Bill Tai, co-founder and president of Metagood, told TechCrunch.
The company launched its flagship NFT collection, OnChainMonkey, to create tokenized value for community members. It also aims to give members the opportunity to promote and fund projects of social good through its DAO, which raised 2,000 ETH in just one year, he added.
Its DAO distributed 70 ETH, or around $90,000 at current prices, to 42 projects over 10 weeks in its “Season 1,” Amanda Terry, co-founder of Metagood, told TechCrunch. Some of her projects include financing the rehabilitation of a skate park in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, with art by OnChainMonkey, and help Afghan refugees evacuate to Italy.
Investors in the recent funding round include Animoca Brands, Morgan Creek Capital founder and CEO Mark Yusko and Virgin Group investment manager Freddie Andrewes, to name a few.
“We appeal to a certain type of person who wants to make a positive impact in the world,” Tai said. “Many of our investors have been very successful in their careers and want to use their influence to do other good things in the world.”
Past investors include a number of high-profile celebrities or executives, including actor Owen Wilson, Virgin Unite president Holly Branson, and Rotten Tomatoes co-founders Patrick Lee and Stephen Wang, as well as cryptocurrency investments from co-founder of Dapper Labs, Roham Gharegozlou, Axie Infinity co-founder Jeffrey Zirlin, and The Sandbox co-founder Sebastien Borget, among others.
Holly Branson see this as a vehicle to extend what it’s doing,” Tai said. “That is the common theme here. Culturally, we attract good-hearted people who want to take the world to better places.”
The capital will be used to grow the company, hire new talent, and build the OnChainMonkey community and tools, Terry said. “We have been profitable with our pre-seed, but we want to continue growing. We are sitting on over 4,600 ETH of our primary and secondary trading revenue.”
Metagood believes that web3 can be a positive force in creating a good karma economy, where people are rewarded for doing good things, Tai said. The startup aims to combine rewards through charitable donations and the prices of OnChainMonkey NFTs. “As karma spreads, the economy grows.”
The DAO model allows for a maximum amount of funding for projects, and fast, Tai said.
The aforementioned skate park is an example of a “charitable micro-grant that would be very difficult to manage with a large organization, and we were able to do it in a matter of days,” Tai said.
“We want the rubber to find its way between causes and donation,” Tai said. “We can address things that large centralized charities that have many authorities cannot do. […] I wouldn’t be surprised if a few years from now we’d be making thousands of these a year.”
