Congrats to Rarify on its Series A!
by Nihal Mehta and Lacey Wisdom
We’re thrilled to share that our portfolio company Rarify just raised a $10 million Series A, at a $100 million valuation, led by Pantera Capital. It’s only been a few months since we invested in the startup’s $2 million seed round, but we already feels like we made a smart bet.
With its Commerce API, Rarify makes it easy for any company to introduce NFTs to their platforms. It also offers API access to historical data on NFT assets across multiple blockchains, as well an NFT Embeds product to simplify NFT discovery and check-out.
In this deal, we saw many of the same ingredients that have made past investments successful: Founders Revaz Tsivtsivadze and Lasha Antadze have a strong track record, having worked together before and built APIs at Shutterstock and Mastercard. And especially after investing in companies like mParticle, Alloy, and 1UpHealth, we love API-focused business models, which benefit from high gross margins and the ability to scale quickly.
But despite those parallels, Rarify is very much a web3 startup. We’re excited about its mission to dramatically increase the commercial adoption and availability of NFTs, and as part of our broader web3 strategy, we believe there are big opportunities for more startups building the “picks and shovels” for this new wave of technology.
Lastly, although we wish we could keep things purely celebratory, we should also take a moment to acknowledge that four of Rarify’s 14 employees are still living in Ukraine during the Russian invasion. Thankfully, the team seems to be safe for now, and we hope that continues to be the case.
