NFT Platform Colexion Bags $5 Mn To Build Metaverse Capabilities

Since April 2021, the NFT craze has caught the attention of anyone remotely interested in Web 3.0. This includes celebrities — from India and beyond, selling artworks on platforms such as GuardianLink.io, Faze, among others. Amid the growing popularity, one of the most popular celebrity NFT platforms, Colexion — famous for launching the ‘Trump Card’ NFTs — has raised $5 Mn in its seed and private round.

The Delhi NCR-based startup raised $1.8 Mn in the seed round and $3.2 Mn from a private round. Combined, both rounds saw participation from Polygon, Jump Trading, Brevan Howard’s Alan Howard, HyperEdge Capital, C² Ventures, GSR, Oracles Investment Group (OIG), Gains Associate. Other prominent names that participated in the round include ZBS Capital, ICO Pantera, Titan Ventures, Good Games Lab, Maven Capital, among others.

Founded in 2021, Colexion is a creative marketplace on the polygon network where fans can buy and trade in digital collectables connected with cricket and entertainment stars. On the platform’s sire, fans can purchase ‘collectable card’ NFTs, including ‘autographed cards’, video moments and other tokens.

The startup hosts 1200+ NFTs from 100+ celebrities and from 10+ countries. Some popular Indian celebrities on Colexion include Yuvraj Singh, Suniel Shetty, Krissann Barretto, Rameet Sandhu, music composer siblings Salim Merchant and Sulaiman Merchant, Tanuj Virwani and Varun Chakravarthy.

With the latest funding, Colexion plans to go beyond conventional trading platforms. It will build and expand its Metaverse infrastructure to offer artists and collectors and partnership with industry leaders and launch its state-of-art digital museum. It also plans to launch virtual gaming features and enable NFT shopping across categories such as art, lifestyle, sports and celebrities.

Scratching The Surface For Non-Fungible Tokens

NFTs are unique files on a blockchain whose ownership is traceable on the Ethereum blockchain. The concept shot into prominence after the first NFT artwork auction in March was won by an Indian-origin crypto entrepreneur Vignesh Sundaresan (aka Metakovan) who paid $69.3 Mn for a digital collage of 5,000 images by artist Mike Winkelmann (aka Beeple) titled “Everydays: The First 5000 Days”.

So far, in 2021, users have sent at least $26.9 Bn worth of cryptocurrency to ERC-721 and ERC-1155 contracts, the two types of Ethereum smart contracts associated with NFT marketplaces and collections.

NFTs provide creators with options that traditional fan merchandise couldn’t offer. For example, a creator can mint an NFT with a smart contract that sends proceeds to the creator each time the NFT is sold or bought, and that is just scratching the surface of what can be done with these tokens!

Currently, NFT use cases include digital art, digital collectables, gaming, e-ticketing, digitisation of real estate on the blockchain, equity financing in the form of private rounds, records’ maintenance and certifications.

Banking on the wave, Indian celebrities joined their global contemporaries such as comedian Ellen Degeneres, rapper Snoop Dogg, singers Lewis Capaldi and Shawn Mendes, to join NFT projects, either as collaborators or investors.

India’s Booming NFT Ecosystem

Homegrown social media and Salman Khan-backed platform Chingari unveiled its crypto token $GARI and an NFT marketplace in September 2021. American fantasy sports and betting company DraftKings formed a strategic agreement with Polygon to accelerate NFT adoption and Web3 through DraftKings Marketplace.

Previously, NFT Marketplace NFTically also raised over $500K in a seed & private round from Nazara Games’ Nitish Mittersain, Coinbase CPO Surojit Chatterjee, Udaan cofounder Sujeet Kumar, actor Kunal Kapoor, among others.

Amid the rising adoption of NFTs, to enhance the liquidity of the marketplaces, NFT lending marketplace, Strip Finance which is building liquidity easing solutions closed an INR 11 Cr round from Old Fashion Research, Nothing Research, MEXC Global Exchange, others. Later, NFT-focussed social platform Hyy.pe, raised $2 Mn in a round led by Elevation Capital.

Backed by NFT ecosystem players and partners, including Rarible, Polygon, Maxin AI and Gizmatic, blockchain analytics startup bitsCrunch, which focuses on policing the NFT Marketplaces, has also recently raised a seed round of $750K from Covalent, Double Peak, GenBlock Capital, Ledger Prime, MEXC Global, and Synaps.

The ‘Indian NFTverse’ continues to grow larger, with exchanges and airdrops growing at a fast pace.