Pinata Looks to Scale NFT Content with Fresh $21.5 Million Funding

NFT distribution platform Pinata has raised $21.5 million in funding. Co-founder and CEO Kyle Tut announced that the firm secured $3.5 million during a seed round in 2021. More recently, Pinata also closed $18 million during a Series A funding round. The former was led by Greylock and Offline Ventures while the latter was co-led by Greylock Partners and Pantera. Investors who participated include Volt Capital, OpenSea, and Alchemy.

Pinata generally provides infrastructure and support marketplaces, metaverses, web3 apps, blockchains, and other crypto-related apps. Through this, it allows creators to distribute and monetize their NFT across various platforms. Pinata supports any type of uploadable content — ranging from videos to apps — on a wide array of blockchains such as Ethereum, Solana, and Polygon.

“We power a significant portion of web3,” explained Tut. “Some of the biggest names in the space are using us. Those users range from non-technical creators to software engineers.” The firm’s user base has significantly increased from 104,000 in January to over 240,000 today. It also reported revenue growth of 42 times year-over-year over the past year.

Big blockchain companies including OpenSea and YugaLabs are partnered with Pinata. “As you fast forward into today, we’ve seen that ultimately NFTs act as if they’re their own applications,” added Tut. “They want to serve content to millions of people like YouTube or TikTok does, but a lot of these applications don’t have the ability to do so yet. To us, [the future] looks like full-blown applications, not just simple images or complex applications associated with NFTs.”

Mike Duboe, a partner at Greylock, expressed similar sentiments. “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,” Duboe explained. “Pinata is the most full-featured offering to help creators and marketplaces program more advanced functionality into this media.”

Sources: TechCrunch, CoinDesk