Participated · Seed · Apr 2023

Hug is a New York-based social marketplace connecting digital art and NFT creators with current and prospective collectors. The platform enables artists to sell digital and physical goods and uses a community-driven, decentralized curation process to spotlight diverse and underrepresented creators. Hug combines social curation and discovery tools with Hug Studios, which offers educational and advisory programs for Web3 startup founders and creative entrepreneurs. The company raised $5M in Seed funding to accelerate product growth and integrate creator-first commerce features with its existing tools. The team is led by founder and CEO Randi Zuckerberg and was later joined by co-founder and Chief Growth Officer Debbie Soon. In November 2022 Hug consolidated the Meta Angels NFT community under its parent company Assemble.

Participated · Seed · Jun 2022

Mech.com is developing NFT-based web3 games, including an initial match-3 title where players earn in-game currency (ore) and the tradable $FORGE token, and a planned arena battle game that integrates NFTs into a play-to-earn ecosystem. The team emphasizes an iterative, small-launch approach to tune gameplay based on community feedback, with a stated focus on making genuinely fun, casual games. Founder and CEO Trey Smith and co-founder Nik Rudenko have prior experience founding two other game studios (Buildbox and KayaBit); Kyle Klemmer joined as COO in 2021 and brought marketing experience and blockchain connections. The company has attracted advisors and early supporters from the crypto and gaming spaces, including Justin Kan and others. Mech.com plans to begin a private round, launch new NFT factions (the Rebel class), and release a beta testing version to early adopters.

Participated · Equity · Nov 2021

Fracture Labs is a Tallinn-based gaming studio developing Decimated, a dystopian open-world third-person survival role-playing game with a blockchain-based economy. In-game items, vehicles, and structures are minted on-chain and persist unless scrapped or destroyed; the game's currency, DIO, has a fixed supply of one billion tokens that trade on real-world exchanges. Decimated has been in development since 2018 and won Best Blockchain Game at the 2019 Crypto Games Conference and received an Epic MegaGrant from Unreal Engine. The company plans to use the new capital to continue game development and to launch an NFT marketplace ahead of the game's planned 2022 release. Fracture Labs raised $3.5 million in the latest investment round, bringing total capital raised to $8 million to date, and previously ran a private token sale targeting $4 million that reportedly attracted over $30 million in offers. The most recent round was pooled from more than a dozen backers including Alameda Research, Huobi Ventures, Spartan Group, and Cryptology AG.