As part of the next phase of the company’s growth, Sten Tamkivi will join the team as a late co-founder, as well as Rain Johanson, former CTO of Bolt, who joins as a CTO and co-founder. Additional investors include Filecoin creator Protocol Labs, Sparkle Ventures, IDEO CoLab Ventures, Polygon co-founder Jaynti Kanani, former Twilio CTO, Ott Kaukver, former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan, and Polkadot co-founder Jutta Steiner, and many other founders.
The round will enable NFTPort to scale its core product which enables developers to bring their NFT applications to market in hours, instead of months.
A real application for Web3
“I’ve always liked the crispness of definition for Web3, the next generation of internet: users can read, write and own information. But it is one thing to talk about vision, and another to build real tools and applications. NFTPort’s role is to add meat to these bones, to build the scaffolding in the form of APIs and decentralised protocols for developers to be able to deliver on the promise of a citizen owned internet,” says Sten Tamkivi, Taavet+Sten Partner and NFTPort co-founder.
Founded in 2021, NFTPort is already used by over 30,000 developer teams, including some of the most well-known Web3 companies, including Nifty Gateway and Protocol Labs. As of March 2022, developers through NFTPort had minted over a million NFTs on Polygon, which is a 10% of all NFTs minted on the Polygon chain.
“We have high conviction in a shift towards increased digital ownership powered by NFT technology, and the potential for NFTs to become a new asset class. However, a lot of the infrastructure required to underpin the widespread adoption of NFTs and other web3 technologies still needs to be built, and this is where NFTPort comes in,” says Atomico Partner Irina Haivas. “We’re energised by the team’s mission to lay the foundations for an internet that can be owned by citizens.”
NFTPort co-founders Johannes Tammekänd, Kaspar Peterson, Taivo Pungas, Sten Tamkivi, and Rain Johanson
NFTPort makes true digital ownership possible
Early use cases for non-fungible tokens (NFT) increased in popularity in 2021 as consumers experienced the emergence of nascent forms of digital ownership in the sports, art, and fashion industries. But this is just the beginning. Acting as a “wrapper” for any form of data, NFTs are set to enable true digital ownership by transferring data from the hands of large data monopolies to individual users. NFTPort’s mission is to lay the infrastructure that will underpin this change and enable developers to make the Internet ownable by citizens, through a decentralised NFT infrastructure.
“When a company decides to build their NFT infrastructure today, it would either have to expend significant sums of money for scarce Web3 developers or invest time upskilling a Web2 developer to carry out the work. Managing constantly evolving blockchain technology quickly becomes a multi-million dollar problem for most companies wishing to build their own NFT infrastructure; like accepting payments online pre-Stripe or building a tech-based product pre-cloud,” says Johannes Tammekänd, CEO and co-founder of NFTPort. “Demand will only increase further as NFTs move beyond images, which will compound pre-existing supply-side issues. Our infrastructure enables developers and companies to bring to market their NFT applications in hours or days, instead of months and thus save hundreds of thousands of dollars,” Tammekänd says.
Key pillars of NFTPort’s infrastructure
NFTPort’s infrastructure provides three key pillars which most companies need in order to build NFT products: data APIs, minting APIs, and user safety APIs.
Data APIs provide access to all NFT data from Ethereum, Polygon and Solana so developers can get up and running, including data parity with OpenSea, in a day.
Minting APIs allows developers to deploy, manage and customise fully owned NFT smart contracts without having to write a line of smart contract code or know the complex Web3 stack. This enables millions of Web2 developers who know REST APIs to turn digital assets into NFTs in their applications.
Finally, NFTPort has built a counterfeit detection engine for developers to cross-check if a given NFT has been previously minted on any of its supported chains, thus increasing user safety. All of the combined, provides a Stripe for NFTs experience for developers and companies.
Following this investment, NFTPort will double down on scaling the core product and bringing to market a decentralised NFT infrastructure protocol. The firm will use today’s funding round to further develop its NFT infrastructure offer and enable the next phase of digital ownership on the internet.
Interested in investing in Estonia? Read more about the opportunities Estonia has to offer in cyber security and use our free e-consulting service to get started.
