Announcing OpenSea’s New Funding

This post was originally published on Opensea

Investment will help improve customer and community experience 

In 2021, we saw the world awaken to the idea that NFTs represent the basic building blocks for brand new peer-to-peer economies. They give users greater freedom and ownership over digital goods, and allow developers to build powerful, interoperable applications that provide real economic value and utility to users. OpenSea’s vision is to become the core destination for these new open digital economies to thrive, building the world’s friendliest and most trusted NFT marketplace with the best selection.

To accelerate this vision, we have raised $300 million in Series C funding at a $13.3 billion post money valuation. Paradigm and Coatue led the round with participation from new and existing investors. We are excited to work with these incredible partners, thinkers and builders who collectively bring a depth of experience in Web3, NFTs, and best in class consumer experiences.

We have four goals for this funding: 1) accelerate product development, 2) significantly improve customer support and customer safety, 3) meaningfully invest in the wider NFT and Web3 community, and 4) grow our team.

Accelerating Product Development and User Experience

As we look to bring NFTs to a broad consumer audience this year, we’re excited to welcome Shiva Rajaraman as our new VP of Product. Shiva joins OpenSea from Meta, where he was the VP of Commerce. Before his time at Meta, he spent time at YouTube, Spotify, and WeWork. Shiva is passionate about building a new web that rewards creativity and participation with fewer gatekeepers, better privacy, and sustainable economics.

We’re focused on lowering the barriers to entry for NFTs by introducing features and simplified flows that abstract away the complexity of the blockchain. We’re also accelerating our multi-chain support and prioritizing improvements to help people discover, manage, and showcase their NFTs with better tools, analytics, and presentation.

Expanding our Trust, Safety and Reliability Efforts

We’re actively expanding our efforts across customer support, trust and safety, and site stability and integrity. This includes both product and technical investments to enable systems that protect and empower our users, as well as significant investments in in-person customer support operations. We’ve already scaled our customer support and trust and safety teams to more than 60 people, and expect to more than double that team by the end of this year.

Making Meaningful Community Investments

Last, we are committed to expanding the entire NFT ecosystem. This quarter, we are launching a grant program to give us the opportunity to directly support the developers, builders, and creators shaping the future of the NFT space. Our ambition is to foster the scale and growth of the broader NFT ecosystem including raising the profile of emerging creators and investing in the people who shape the NFT space for the better today.

Growing our Team

We saw the NFT ecosystem explode last year, with OpenSea’s transaction volume increasing over 600x in 2021. But we’re just getting started – and we need to scale our team quickly! If you’re motivated to build the destination for new open digital economies, we are hiring across the board. We couldn’t be more excited about the journey ahead. 

The post Announcing OpenSea’s New Funding appeared first on OpenSea Blog.

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