NFT Marketplace Zora Bags $50M From Katie Haun’s Crypto Fund and Others

Non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace Zora announced earlier this week that it has raised $50 million in its latest funding round.

Zora Hits $600 Million Valuation

The funding, which now brings the company’s valuation to $600 million, was led by Haun Ventures and saw participation from Coinbase Ventures, Kindred Ventures, and others.

Zora is an Ethereum-based marketplace for buying, selling, and creating NFTs. The platform has been used in auctioning some of the industry’s high-priced NFTs, including the “Doge” NFT sold at $4 million.

Jacob Horne, co-founder of Zora, said the fresh capital will be used to build better tools for creators.

“For our ecosystem, this is an acceleration of the public infrastructure that facilitates your advancement as artists, developers, and communities. It means more permissionless code deployed on more chains, better APIs, more Zoratopias around the world, and an increase in grants and hackathons.” 

Haun Ventures First-Led Funding

The investment in Zora marks Haun Ventures’ first in since the fund was launched.

In March, Katie Haun announced she has raised $1.5 billion for Haun Ventures after Andreessen Horowitz’s (a16z) departure. The fund was split into two: $500 million for early-stage crypto startups and $1 billion for accelerated funds.

Speaking on the recent investment, Sam Rosenblum, deal team lead at Haun Ventures, said:

“Today, we are proud to be backing Zora during the next step in its journey. We have only seen the tip of the iceberg of NFTs in web3 and believe Zora will become one of the most important protocols (and DAOs) as the NFT ecosystem and associated use cases meaningfully expand in the years to come.”

NFT Boom

Meanwhile, non-fungible tokens continue to gain more adoption and record massive numbers in recent times.

In 2021, the NFT market recorded over $17 billion in trading volume, a 21,000% increase from the previous year, data from Nonfungible.com confirmed. The report showed that NFT trades took place across 2.5 million wallets, up from 89,000 the previous year, and the number of buyers also rose to 2.3 million last year from 75,000 in 2020.