NFT project raised $54 million with support from Reddit founder
Popular NFT collection Doodles raised $54 million in a recent equity round of funding, according to a report from Forbes. The funding round was led by Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, a longtime Doodles holder, via his venture capital firm Seven Seven Six.
The report claims that the NFT project was backed by other big names in the crypto industry with backing from FTX Ventures, Acrew Capital and 10T Holdings. Doodles launched in 2021 as a limited collection of 10,000 items that have managed to surpass $100 million in total value.
Like other popular NFT collections, Doodles consist of digital assets with unique and immutable features of varying rarity levels. Data provided by Forbes via NFTPriceFloor indicates that the rarest of these items sold for over $1 million with the lowest selling price at around 6.6 ETH or around $10,000.
Doodles celebrated the funding round’s success via their official Twitter handlethe company claims it will use a portion of the funds to expand its staff with a team of engineers, a marketing team, business executives and more.
We’re excited to announce that Doodles has raised $54 million at a $704 million valuation.https://t.co/XCTphrxpR9@sevensevensix @10TFund @AcrewCapital @FTX_Official
— doodles (@doodles) 13 September 2022
Another part of the funds will be used for product development, acquisitions, development of proprietary technology and innovation of the owners’ experiences. The latter is an important point for the team behind Doodles, as the project aims to give investors more use cases for their NFTs.
The company will launch 18 new full-time positions with the aim of driving its vision for Doodles across multiple sectors, including games and music. Via Twitter, the team behind the project added:
This will increase our team from 11 to 30. All of these hires will be carefully designed to achieve Doodles’ long-term goal of being the number one web3 entertainment brand in the world.
Doodles to expand NFT use cases? Seeking partnerships
The company hired Brandon Rosenblatt as head of brand partnerships. Rosenblatt worked with Spongecell, a large advertising technology company, for over a decade and has worked with Fortune 500 companies.
The new Doodles employee comes in at a critical time for the project. In recent months, the project has consolidated partnerships with important name companies in the entertainment sector, such as rapper and music producer Pharell Williams as Chief Brand Officer.
Julian Hoguin, CEO of Doodles, sees their foray into music and video games as a way to increase adoption and give holders new experiences and use cases for their digital assets. In that sense, the investment and advice of Seven Seven Six and its founder Katelin Holloway is crucial, Hoguin said:
As we scale and we scale quickly. having her as a sounding board and as a true partner is going to be invaluable because we want to build on culture, we want to evoke joy and creativity (…). We want to create products for our core collector base, but at the same time use these great forms of marketing like music, to introduce new people to Web3 and onboard them into the Doodles ecosystem.
