Pinata, an NFT-focused media distribution platform, has raised a total of $21.5 million in funding, the company exclusively told TechCrunch.
This is the only capital the four-year-old company has raised to date. The entire amount came from a recently closed seed round of $18 million Series A and $3.5 million in 2021, Kyle Tut, co-founder and CEO of pinatahe told TechCrunch. Series A was co-led by Greylock and Pantera, and the seed round was co-led by Greylock and Offline Ventures. Other investors include Volt Capital, OpenSea, and Alchemy.
The Omaha, Nebraska-based company provides media infrastructure and support for NFT marketplaces, metaverses, web3 applications, and other cryptographic projects. It allows users to manage, share, and monetize their media on any blockchain like Ethereum, Solana, Polygon, Avalanche, and Algorand to name a few.
“We power a significant part of web3,” Tut said. “Some of the biggest names in the space are using us. Those users range from non-technical creators to software engineers.”
In the past year, Pinata’s revenue growth has increased 42 times year-over-year, Tut said. Since January, its user base has increased by approximately 131%, from 104,000 users to more than 240,000 users to date, Tut shared. Companies like OpenSea, DraftKings, Protocol Labs, and Yuga Labs also use the platform.
“As you fast forward to today, we’ve seen that ultimately NFTs act as if they were their own apps,” Tut said. “They want to deliver content to millions of people like YouTube or TikTok, but a lot of these apps don’t have the ability to do that yet.”
The platform provides infrastructure for both startup creators and enterprises to store, manage and build more features on their NFTs, Greylock partner Mike Duboe said in a statement shared with TechCrunch.
“While NFT activity today may be focused on static jpeg files, we believe this is just the tip of the iceberg for this technology and that the most exciting applications around NFT involve richer media with deeper functionality,” he said. Duboe.
Ultimately, Pinata aims to deliver content at scale for NFT projects that want to focus on media and content creation, Tut said. The fresh capital will be used to grow the team and improve its infrastructure to make it faster, more stable, and capable of “powering the next generation of NFTs.”
“For us, [the future] it looks like full apps, not just simple images or complex apps associated with NFTs,” Tut said. “NFTs are going to be so much more than what people understand today.”
