- Digital marketplace company SuperRare announced recently that it has raised $9 million in funding. These are the details.
Digital marketplace company SuperRare announced recently that it has raised $9 million in funding. The four-year-old-company was built by three friends working out of a coffee shop in Brooklyn with the goal of building a new art market designed for the digital age and using NFTs as a way to authenticate and certify digital
And after 6 months of development, the idea was turned into a reality and SuperRare had launched on the Ethereum mainnet on April 4th, 2018. The founding team immediately knew that they were not the only ones excited by the potential as a small passionate group of artists quickly formed the SuperRare community.
This round of funding was led by Velvet Sea Ventures and 1confirmation with participation from Version1, Collaborative Fund, Shrug Capital, Third Kind, The LAO, SamsungNext, BlockTower, AndArt Agency, Ashton Kutcher and Guy Oseary’s Sound Ventures, Qinwen Wang, Andrew Stienwold, Scott Belsky, Mark Cuban, Marc Benioff, Naval Ravikant, and Chamath Palihapitiya.
In the first year, artists on SuperRare were averaging about $8,000 of sales per month. And this year, this figure increased by over 31,000% to $25 million per month. To date, artists have earned over $30 million on SuperRare from primary sales and from secondary market royalties – as artists earn a 10% cut of each subsequent sale of their artwork in the market for perpetuity.
In about three years, the crypto art market has grown to be a global phenomenon at over $400 million in size. And this investment will allow SuperRare to accelerate growth, serving significantly more artists and collectors as digital collecting nears more mainstream adoption.
With the funding round, the company is going to expand the core features of SuperRare into more scalable and social elements such as chat and personalized feeds. And the company is also going to enhance market mechanics and auction functionality as well as extending artwork formats further into virtual reality. Plus they are going to push the long-term sustainability of artworks and ownership by implementing layer-2 scaling solutions.
