SO-COL Raises $1.75M In Seed Funding to Empower Creators and their Communities

The investment will further SO-COL’s vision by expanding the team to further develop technologies to improve the onboarding experience for first-time crypto users and enhance the engagement between creators and their fans.

SO-COL (Social Collectables), the all-in-one, decentralized alternative to Discord, Snapshot, and OnlyFans, announced the close of a US$1.75 million seed round.

The funding round was co-led by DeFiance Capital and Animoca Brands, with participation from Three Arrows Capital, Mechanism Capital, Global Founders Capital, Double Peak Group, Antifund, Genblock Capital, and Kronos Research.

SO-COL’s platform enables creators to manage and interact with their communities through utility NFTs, known as collectables on the platform. SO-COL is working with StarkWare to deploy and build on their own instance of StarkEx, a layer-2 scalability engine on Ethereum, to greatly improve the onboarding, payment, and transaction experience for users. They are also building their own decentralized ID (DID) protocol, which serves as a way for creators to bridge their ac- counts over from web2 social media to web3.

— Yat Siu, Executive Chairman and Co-founder of Animoca Brands

“We believe that DIDs will play an important part for integrating the various platforms within the social, gaming, and metaverse space, and we are excited to support SO-COL’s positive moves in this direction”.

SO-COL jump-started its marketing campaign by launching IreneDAO, a social experiment based on influencer and SO-COL co-founder Irene Zhao. The experiment’s unprecedented viral- ity took web3 Twitter by storm, validating the core thesis of SO-COL’s value proposition. Numer- ous community DAOs of varying utility have since been formed. “Our proof of concept IreneDAO is just a glimpse into what the future of the creator economy could look like, where the flow of value goes both ways between creators and fans”, said SO-COL co-founder, Benjamin Tang.

— Arthur Cheong, the founder of DeFiance Capital

“SO-COL offers a better way for content creators to connect and manage their communities… We are also constantly impressed with our experience of working with Irene and Ben, who in our view, are the best team possible to build SO-COL… We are beyond excited to back and support them on this journey.”

SO-COL will use the proceeds of this funding round to expand its team, especially in product and development. Funds will also be used on marketing and partnerships, enabling SO-COL to extend its reach and benefit more creators.

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