OpenSea Raises $300M in Series C Funding Round
OpenSea raised a $300M funding round led by Coatue and Paradigm increased OpenSea’s valuation at $13.3 billion. The NFT marketplace vowed to employ the investment into four categories: accelerate product development, improve customer support, invest in the wider NFT and Web3 community, and grow its team.
To accelerate this vision, OpenSea has raised $300 million in Series C funding at a $13.3 billion post-money valuation. Paradigm and Coatue led the round with participation from new and existing investors. They are excited to work with these incredible partners, thinkers, and builders who collectively bring a depth of experience in Web3, NFTs, and best-in-class consumer experiences.
Opensea has four goals for this funding:
- Accelerate product development
- Significantly improve customer support and customer safety
- Meaningfully invest in the wider NFT and Web3 community
- Grow its team
Accelerating Product Development and User Experience
As they look to bring NFTs to a broad consumer audience this year, they are excited to welcome Shiva Rajaraman as their new VP of Product. Shiva joins OpenSea from Meta, where he was the VP of Commerce. Before his time at Meta, he spent time at YouTube, Spotify, and WeWork. Shiva is passionate about building a new web that rewards creativity and participation with fewer gatekeepers, better privacy, and sustainable economics.
They are focused on lowering the barriers to entry for NFTs by introducing features and simplified flows that abstract away the complexity of the blockchain. They are also accelerating our multi-chain support and prioritizing improvements to help people discover, manage, and showcase their NFTs with better tools, analytics, and presentation.
Expanding Their Trust, Safety and Reliability Efforts
They are actively expanding our efforts across customer support, trust and safety, and site stability and integrity. This includes both product and technical investments to enable systems that protect and empower our users, as well as significant investments in in-person customer support operations. They have already scaled our customer support and trust and safety teams to more than 60 people and expect to more than double that team by the end of this year.
Making Meaningful Community Investments
They are committed to expanding the entire NFT ecosystem. This quarter, they are launching a grant program to give them the opportunity to directly support the developers, builders, and creators shaping the future of the NFT space. Their ambition is to foster the scale and growth of the broader NFT ecosystem including raising the profile of emerging creators and investing in the people who shape the NFT space for the better today.
Growing its Team
They saw the NFT ecosystem explode last year, with OpenSea’s transaction volume increasing over 600x in 2021. But they are just getting started – and they need to scale their team quickly! If you’re motivated to build the destination for new open digital economies, they are hiring across the board. They couldn’t be more excited about the journey ahead.
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