Web3 Builders Announces $7M Raise to Build NFTs and Smart Contract Security Tool

Quick take:

• Web3 Builders has raised $7 million to accelerate the development of its security platform for smart contracts and NFTs.
• TrustCheck is a fraud prevention tool for smart contracts, NFTs and crypto transactions.
• The seed round attracted participation from OpenSea Ventures, Road Capital and others.

Web3 Builders Inc., a crypto security startup, has raised $7 million in a funding round backed by Road Capital and OpenSea Ventures, the investment arm of the world’s largest NFT marketplace OpenSea. Other investors in the round include Sparkle Ventures, Picus Capital, ACME, TTV, G20, Global Founders Capital and Haven Ventures.

Web3 Builders’ leadership team includes co-founder Nicholas Horelik, CEO Riccardo Pellegrini and Web3 Chief Technology Officer Henry Katz.

An NFT is a digital representation of a piece of art, JPEG, collectible, music track, virtual/physical item or video clip stored on the blockchain.

The company announced a blockchain security tool TrustCheck, which prevents those trading in non-fungible tokens (NFTs), smart contracts and cryptos from falling victim to fraud. TrustCheck is a web extension currently available for Chrome-based operating systems. The extension assesses the risk of a transaction by running checks against the company’s machine learning engine.

Crypto security has become a focal point for several web3 startups amid the increased cases of platform exploitation through fraud. Hackers have already stolen more than $1.3 billion in 2022 from crypto companies, including the Axie Infinity heist, which saw $625 million stolen by the North Korean hacking group Lazarus.

Web3 Builders joins a growing list of crypto security providers that includes cryptanalysis and fraud detection company Chainalysis, which expanded its service to cover NFTs after raising $170 million.

Last month, bug bounty platform Immunefi raised $24 million in a Series A round to secure web3 platforms with bounties and payouts, mitigating them from the negative effects of crypto exploits. The company uses white-hat hackers and developers to review code for potential bugs that can be exploited by black-hat hackers.

Web3 Builders plans to use the funds to expand its team and develop new protocols for artificial intelligence and machine learning methods.

In May, another NFT fraud detection platform Doppel raised $5 million to improve its web3 security capabilities. A month later, NFT fraud prevention startup Tovera acquired NFT fraud detection project SnifflesNFT for an undisclosed fee to take down NFTs minted without permission.

Web3 Builder’s security product TrustCheck works differently than some of the tools out there. According to the announcement, the tool leverages data from over a dozen sources covering tens of thousands of reported and validated frauds, and hundreds of millions of addresses, to analyze the potential risks of a transaction.

“What has become clear is that a lot of the time, the way most people get scammed is a direct message on Twitter or Discord that takes them to a phishing site that leads them to a wallet opener,” said Web3 Builders CEO Ricky Pellegrini to CoinDesk.

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