Pinata Raises $21.5M to Scale NFT Media Infrastructure – TechCrunch

Pinata, an NFT-focused media distribution platform, has raised a total of $21.5 million in funding, the company told TechCrunch exclusively.

This is the only capital the four-year-old company has raised to date. The total amount came from a recently closed $18 million Series A and $3.5 million seed round in 2021, Kyle Tut, co-founder and CEO of Pinata, told TechCrunch. Series A was led by Greylock and Pantera, and the seed round was led by Greylock and Offline Ventures. Other investors include Volt Capital, OpenSea and Alchemy.

The Omaha, Nebraska-based business provides media infrastructure and support for NFT marketplaces, metaverses, web3 apps and other crypto projects. It allows users to manage, share and monetize media on any blockchain such as Ethereum, Solana, Polygon, Avalanche and Algorand to name a few.

“We run a significant portion of web3,” Tut said. “Some of the biggest names in the space use us. These users range from non-technical creators to software engineers.”

In the past year, Pinata’s revenue growth has increased 42 times year over year, Tut said. Since January, the user base has increased by around 131% from 104,000 users to over 240,000 users as of today, Tut shared. Companies such as OpenSea, DraftKings, Protocol Labs and Yuga Labs also use the platform.

“As you fast forward to today, we’ve seen NFTs eventually behave as if they were their own applications,” Tut said. “They want to deliver content to millions of people like YouTube or TikTok do, but many of these applications don’t have the ability to do that yet.”

The platform provides infrastructure for both new creators and businesses to store, manage and build more functionality into their NFTs, Mike Duboe, partner at Greylock, said in a statement shared with TechCrunch.

“While current NFT activity may focus on static jpegs, we believe this is only the tip of the iceberg for this technology and that the most interesting applications around NFTs involve richer media with deeper functionality,” said Duboe.

Ultimately, Pinata aims to serve content at scale for NFT projects that want to focus on building out media and content, Tut said. The fresh capital will be used to expand the team and improve the infrastructure, making it faster, more stable and able to “power the next generation of NFTs”.

“To us, [the future] look like full-fledged applications, not just simple images or complex applications associated with NFTs,” Tut said. “NFTs are going to be so much more than people understand today.”