Pitch Deck NFT Startup Fair.xyz Used to Raise $4.55M

• Fair.xyz is a new startup that hopes to make the NFT minting process more “accessible”.
• The co-founders left their jobs at Instagram, Meta and Goldman Sachs in January.
• In August, they announced a seed round of $4.55 million. Read their 13-page pitch deck.

Back in June, startup Fair.xyz made headlines after a Snoop Dogg look-alike was spotted in the crowds at the NFT.NYC conference.

It wasn’t actual Snoop Dogg. It was Doop Snogg, an impersonator hired by Fair.xyz as a stunt to shed light on the widespread fraud and deception in the NFT industry.

“We used Doop Snogg as a fun way to highlight our goal of removing fraudsters, bots and fraud from the NFT space,” the London-based startup told Insider in June.

Fair.xyz hopes to build an end-to-end, code-free Web3 platform to help creators and collectors create NFTs as an entry point into the industry. A core focus of the startup is preventing “gas wars” that drive up coin costs, as well as keeping bots at bay with its “smart contract” and “proprietary smart queuing technology,” according to the startup.

Last week, Fair.xyz announced its first round of funding: a $4.55 million seed round with participation from Eden Block NFX, First Minute Capital and OpenSea.

The founders, a team of three engineers, left their jobs at Instagram, Meta and Goldman Sachs to build Fair.xyz in January. By March, the startup had begun the process of seeking funding and prepared a pitch deck to send to investors, co-founder Isaac Bentata told Insider.

But the timing for Fair.xyz was not ideal – they launched headfirst into a cooling NFT market.

While NFT sales peaked in 2021, weekly NFT sales fell 53% in mid-April, according to data from NonFungible.com. This decline continued throughout the summer.

Fair.xyz’s founders did not shy away from this topic when raising money.

“We were very upfront that we think the main reason people are buying NFTs right now is to try to make money,” co-founder Isaac Kamlish said. “It will actually take a lot of work to move that use case away from financial speculation to actual utility.”

To further complicate the market, a broader economic downturn had also cast a shadow over the technology industry.

“People don’t like places that are all dandy,” Bentata said. “The reality is that there will be problems. It’s just better if you have some foresight and are able to predict them so you can deal with them accordingly when they come up.”

With the economic factors at play, Fair.xyz had to adjust its fundraising expectations. Meanwhile, VCs and investors encouraged the entrepreneurs to think small and strategically.

“We had no idea how much we wanted to get,” Kamlish said of the dollar sign Fair.xyz had its eyes on.

“It’s easy to be greedy now and go after the headlines,” Kamlish added. “But the big problem you have is that there is a decline that we have seen now in the last few months, it is very difficult to do another round.”

Their $4.5 million round is enough to build out the company and its product without unrealistic expectations and pressure, Kamlish said.

Read the 13-page pitch deck Fair.xyz used to land its latest seed round: