How This NFT Project Raised $54 M With Backing From A Reddit Co-Founder

Popular NFT collection Doodles raised $54 million in a recent equity funding, per a report from Forbes. The funding round was led by Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, a long-time Doodles holder, via his venture capital firm Seven Seven Six.

The report claims that the NFT project was supported by other major names in the crypto industry with backing from FTX Ventures, Acrew Capital, and 10T Holdings. Doodles were launched in 2021 as a limited 10,000 items-only collection that has managed to surpass $100 million in total value.

Similar to other popular NFT collections, Doodles is comprised of digital assets with unique and immutable features with different rarity tiers. Data provided by Forbes via NFTPriceFloor indicates that the rarest of these items was sold for over $1 million with the lowest sale price standing at around 6.6 ETH or around $10,000.

Doodles celebrated the funding round success via their official Twitter handle, the company claims that will use a part of the funds to expand its staff with a team of engineers, a marketing team, business executives, and more.

We’re thrilled to announce that Doodles has raised $54M at a $704M valuation.https://t.co/XCTphrxpR9@sevensevensix@10TFund@AcrewCapital@FTX_Official
— doodles (@doodles) September 13, 2022

Another portion of the funds will be used for product development, acquisitions, creating proprietary technology, and innovating the holders’ experiences. The latter is an important point for the team behind Doodles as the project aims at providing investors with more use cases for their NFTs.

The company will launch 18 new full-time positions with the objective of pushing its vision for Doodles across multiple sectors, including gaming and music. Via Twitter, the team behind the project added:

This will grow our team from 11 to 30. All of these hires will be meticulously crafted to accomplish Doodles’ long-term goal of being the most important Web3 native entertainment brand in the world.

ETH’s price with minor losses on the 4-hour chart. Source: ETHUSDT Tradingview

Doodles To Expand NFT Use Cases? Seeks Out Partnerships

The company hired Brandon Rosenblatt as its Head of Brand Partnerships. Rosenblatt worked with Spongecell, a major advertising technology company, for over a decade and has worked with Fortune 500 companies.

The new Doodles hired are coming in at a critical time for the project. Over the last months, the project has consolidated partnerships with important name companies in the entertainment sector, such as rapper and music producer Pharell Williams as Chief Brand Officer.

Julian Hoguin, CEO at Doodles, views their incursion into music and video games as a way to increase adoption and provide holders with new experiences and use cases for their digital assets. In that sense, the investment and advice from Seven Seven Six and its founding partner Katelin Holloway are crucial, Hoguin said:

As we scale and we scale rapidly. having her as a sounding board and as a true partner is going to be invaluable because we want to be built on culture, we want to elicit joy and creativity (…). We want to create products for our core collector base, but at the same time utilize these great forms of marketing like music, to introduce new people to Web3 and onboard them into the Doodles ecosystem.