NFT-Focused Startup Metagood Raises $5M to Boost ‘Social Good’ Impact • TechCrunch
Metagood, a for-profit social impact NFT startup, has raised $5 million in its pre-seed round, the team exclusively told TechCrunch.
“We launched the company on the concept of using NFTs as an expression where everyone does good things for each other and those good things are tokenized and fungible,” Bill Tai, co-founder and chairman of Metagood, told TechCrunch.
The company launched its flagship NFT collection OnChainMonkey to create tokenized value for community members. It also aims to give its members the chance to promote and fund social good projects through its DAO, which raised 2,000 ETH in just one year, he added.
Its DAO distributed 55 ETH, or $68,500 at current prices, to 28 projects over 10 weeks in its “Season 1,” Amanda Terry, co-founder of Metagood, told TechCrunch. Some of the projects include funding the rehabilitation of a skate park in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, with art from OnChainMonkey and helping Afghan refugees evacuate to Italy.
Investors in the latest funding round include Animoca Brands, Morgan Creek Capital founder and CEO Mark Yusko, and Virgin Group chief investment officer Freddie Andrewes, to name a few.
“We appeal to a certain type of person who wants to make a positive impact on the world,” Tai said. “Many of our investors have experienced great success in their careers and want to use their influence to do other good things in the world.”
Previous investors include a number of high-profile celebrities or executives such as actor Owen Wilson, Virgin Unite chairman Holly Branson and Rotten Tomatoes co-founders Patrick Lee and Stephen Wang, as well as crypto investments from Dapper Labs co-founder Roham Gharegozlou, Axie Infinity co-founder Jeffrey Zirlin and The Sandbox co-founder Sebastien Borget, among others.
“Holly Branson sees this as a vehicle to expand what she does,” Tai said. “That’s the common theme here. Culturally, we attract good-hearted people who want to lead the world to better places.”
The capital will be used to grow the company, hire new talent and build OnChainMonkey’s community and tools, Terry said. “We’ve been profitable from our pre-seed, but we want to keep growing. We’re sitting on about 3,000 ETH from our public coin and other revenue.”
Metagood believes that web3 can be a positive force in creating an economy with good karma, where people are rewarded for doing good things, Tai said. The startup aims to combine rewards through charitable giving and the prices of OnChainMonkey NFTs. “When the karma spreads, the economy grows.”
The DAO model allows for a maximum amount of funds to go to projects — and quickly, Tai said.
The skate park mentioned above is an example of a “micro charity grant that would be very difficult to manage with a large organization, and we were able to pull it off in a matter of days,” Tai said.
“We want the rubber to meet the road between causes and giving,” Tai said. “We can address things that big centralized charities that have a lot of government can’t do. […] It wouldn’t surprise me if we’d be doing thousands of these over the years.”
