NFT Collection Doodles valued at $704 million after raising $54 million in funding round
Doodles secured $54 million in a funding round on Tuesday, taking its valuation to $704 million. Several prominent investors including FTX Ventures, Acrew Capital and 10T Holdings participated in the funding round.
Doodles valued at $704 million after new funding
Doodles, a popular collection of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) led by Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, announced Tuesday that it raised $54 million in a Series A funding round. The financing, supported by FTX Ventures and Acrew Capital, among others, brings the project’s value to 704 million dollars.
Doodles intends to use the new funding to fuel its expansion into music, gaming and NFT sectors that are seeing strong interest. Doodles CEO Julian Hoguin said the project’s expansion efforts will be aided by a new board member, Katelin Holloway, a 776 founder who was introduced to Doodles by Ohanian last year.
Having Holloway “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,” Hoguin said.
“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.”
– Julian Hoguin, CEO of Doodles
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Doodles Raise Expansion Stakes Amid NFT Crunch
Doodle’s new funding round comes after eight difficult months for NFT and the wider web3 market. Interest in NFT bottomed out earlier this year, with NFT trading volume plunging to just $191 million in August, from $3.5 billion in May.
Nevertheless, Doodles remains one of the largest NFT profile picture collections in the world. The project has minted about 10,000 NFTs so far, which are currently worth about $121 million, according to NFTPriceFloor. The project’s all-time sales volume is 148 ETH ($258,000), ranking it 9th on the NFT marketplace OpenSea, which dominates the sector in terms of market share.
Doodles also welcomed singer-songwriter Pharell Williams as its chief brand officer in June, underscoring the project’s interest in expanding further into music-themed NFTs. Holguin believes music NFTs offer an opportunity to lure more people into Web3, which has seen a massive influx of venture capital (VC) funding this year.
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About the author
Tim Fries is the co-founder of The Tokenist. He has a B. Sc. in mechanical engineering from the University of Michigan, and an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Tim served as a Senior Associate in the investment team at RW Baird’s US Private Equity division and is also a co-founder of Protective Technologies Capital, an investment firm specializing in sensing, protection and control solutions.
