NFT Marketplace OpenSea valued at $1.5B in $100M Series B round led by A16z

The NFT marketplace is now valued at $1.5 billion with the latest $100 million funding round led by Silicon Valley’s best-known VC, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) which also led OpenSea’s $23 million Series A back in March.

There are only a handful of crypto startups that have become unicorns and OpenSea is perhaps the only one to do it as an NFT focused company.

OpenSea’s trading activity has endured and even grown. Its NFT marketplace, which takes a 2.5% cut, posted a record $160 million in digital asset sales back in June.

The co-founder and CEO Devin Finzer said the market has shifted to niche projects experimenting in ways weird and strange. Bored Ape Yacht Club, whose 10,000 NFT primates double as digital access passes has been a big driver of volume. The horse racing game ZED RUN has also been a hit.

“It’s getting much more interesting than one-off art sales,” Finzer said. “The art is still really cool, but gaming, event ticketing, domain names, those sorts of use cases have moved into position.”

The marketplace is planning to support NFT sales from other blockchain networks apart from Ethereum, like Flow and Tezos. 

The plan is a compromise for economics and accessibility. Transactions on Ethereum are just too pricey for casual users, Finzer stated. He said other blockchains better support low-value, high-volume projects like event ticketing or gameplay that OpenSea plans to court.

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