Latin American NFT Marketplace Minteo Raises $4.3M Seed Round • TechCrunch

The big hype surrounding NFTs may have died down a bit since the crypto subsector took off last year, but that’s not stopping startups from building and raising capital in the space.

Minteo, a Latin American-based NFT marketplace, is betting on the digital asset sector to become big in the region after it raised $4.3 million in seed funding, the company exclusively told TechCrunch.

Investors in the round include Fabric Ventures, Dune Ventures, CMT Digital, Impatient VC, Susquehanna Private Equity Investments, SevenX Ventures, FJ Labs, Big Brain Holdings, G20 Ventures, Alliance DAO, Zero Knowledge and several angel investors.

Interestingly, OpenSea Ventures also participated in the round, although their NFT marketplace is the largest in the area and will technically compete with Minteo.

“On OpenSea, there are a bunch of categories, it’s hard to navigate and unless you’re in the top collection, it’s hard to reach an audience if you’re a creator,” William Durán, CMO of Minteo told TechCrunch. “We’re trying to simplify the user experience from the infrastructure side, while making it easier for them to access local content on mobile.”

While there are other NFT marketplaces both in Latin America and around the world, Minteo plans to differentiate itself through its infrastructure and focus on working with local artists and brands, among others, Minteo CEO Santiago Rodríguez told TechCrunch. “So all of that adds up to a completely different product at the end of the day.”

Minteo’s co-founders Sebastian Salazar, Santiago Rodríguez, Javier Lozano and William Durán. Image credit: Mariana Reyes

“The idea is to work with top artists in the region, the 40-50 best artists in each country,” said Durán. “They don’t necessarily have to be involved in NFTs yet, this can be their gateway to that and we want to help artists get into NFTs.”

Minteo is aiming for its beta version to be released next month, Rodríguez said. The platform must be fully accessible to the public by the beginning of 2023.

The capital will be used to build the platform, get artists on board from Colombia and Mexico and then over time expand to other Latin American countries, Rodríguez said.

In addition to an NFT marketplace, the platform will also have a mobile wallet and fiat ramps through its “three-in-one product,” Rodríguez said. “No one really needs to know the technical stuff, so we make it simple and build it on mobile because about 70% of Latin American commerce is mobile. People don’t really use desktops.”

With that said, Rodríguez said he is already seeing a lot of interest in NFTs in Latin America.

“In Latin America we are all funny, good dancers and love music and art. That’s when we realized that what has taken off in the NFTs so far are the cultural communities, and that has a huge cultural opportunity for Latin America, Rodríguez said. “But right now, crypto is hard to get hold of in the first place… a lot of exchanges don’t work well, only very technical people use it. Outside of technical circles, its use is currently limited.”

In the long term, Minteo hopes to make buying and selling NFTs “as easy as possible as one-click trading,” Durán noted.

“There are so many things going on with this,” Rodríguez said. It’s a brand new technology that can change access to anything. Our vision is to continue to build on new use cases and drive real value from NFTs.”