Doodles NFTs Announces Pharrell as Chief Brand Officer, Fundraise Led by Alexis Ohanian

Ethereum NFT project Doodles made a couple of important announcements at an event hosted alongside the NFT NYC conference tonight, revealing that musician and producer Pharrell Williams will join the project and that it has raised its first round of funding led by venture capital firm Seven Seven Six.

Williams, who recently joined NFT space with its own Gallery of Digital Assets (GODA) project, will join Doodles as Chief Brand Officer. In his new role, Williams will help shape the collection’s approach to music, artwork, consumer products, animation and events.

“I’m a big fan of the brand,” Williams said in a pre-recorded video message during the event. “We will build from the core community beyond and bring Doodles to new heights, new levels.”

In addition, he will serve as executive producer on an album of Doodles-inspired music called “Doodles Records: Volume 1”, which will be released in collaboration with Columbia Records. The album will feature “great recording artists,” according to a Doodles spokesman, and will feature artwork from Doodles artist Scott “Burnt Toast” Martin.

The Doodles album will be available for streaming via various platforms, but will only be sold via NFTs. According to the representative, the Doodles album NFT will also be bundled with additional, as yet unspecified NFT collectibles.

In addition to the news about Williams, the creators of Doodles also announced that Seven Seven Six, the VC company of Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, led a round of funding for the project. This is the first capital raising for Doodles.

In a pre-recorded video message shown at the event, Ohanian said that Seven Seven Six plans to work with the Doodles team to “take all the work they’ve done so far and take it to another level, scale it even further.” Seven Seven Six co-founder Katelin Holloway will join the Doodles’ board, along with Williams.

The financing amount was not announced.

At the event, the creators also announced Doodles 2, a new NFT collection that will span millions of avatars – up from 10,000 in the original collection – and has a wider range of features along with items that can be carried. The avatars will not be released on Ethereum, but the team did not announce which blockchain the new collection will be released on.

Doodles was launched in October 2021 and has since become one of the most valuable NFT collections on the market. To date, it has generated nearly $ 500 million in secondary trading volume, per data from CryptoSlam. Doodles recently introduced former Billboard President Julian Holguin as CEO.

An NFT serves as proof of ownership of an item, and it is commonly used for digital items such as unique profile pictures (such as Doodles), as well as artwork, collectibles, and video game items.

Seven Seven Six earlier invested in Moonbirdsan Ethereum NFT collection that was launched this spring to huge buzz. Moonbirds comes from PROOF Collective, a Web3 started by series founder and venture capitalist Kevin Rose, and it raised $ 10 million from Seven Seven Six.

Ohanian, a vocal NFT spokesman and collector of projects, including CryptoPunks and Bored Ape Yacht Clubhas previously announced Web3 co-investment measures with both Solana and Polygon.

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