• Anima

  Participated · Equity · Dec 2022

  Anima builds tools and a protocol to bring 3D assets into augmented reality, letting creators view, interact with, tokenize and sell AR creations. Cofounded in early 2021 by Alex Herrity (formerly at Epic Games) and Neil Voss (formerly at Nintendo and Tumblr), the team includes gaming and VFX experts and has launched in-house projects like Onlybots and partnered works such as Mirror with artist Demsky. The company is currently in beta and planned to open access to the public in early 2023. Anima positions AR as a medium for an "ownable digital layer" and emphasizes creator ownership versus ephemeral AR filters. It intends to take a percentage of sales from projects using its protocol, though specific fee percentages are still being determined. The startup raised $3 million in a recent financing and shared 15 slides from the pitch deck it used to raise the round. Anima builds an augmented-reality experience to shift how NFT art and digital collectibles are viewed and shared, aiming to create a tactile relationship between digital objects and real-world contexts. The startup was founded by the creators of photo/video app Ultravisual (acquired by Flipboard in 2014) and is led by co-founders Alex Herrity and Neil Voss. Anima has run early experiments with a handful of artists to bring digital art into AR. The company plans to launch a marketplace next month on ConsenSys’s Palm platform to showcase future partnerships. The team positions its product as a more approachable way to experience NFTs as the broader speculative market cools. Financially, Anima completed a small $500K pre-seed round to support its early product and marketplace rollout.

• Sound

  Participated · Seed · Dec 2021

  Sound is a San Francisco–based Web3 music platform that lets artists upload songs onchain and mint them as NFTs, using Ethereum and the Optimism layer-2 scaling solution. Artists maintain creative control, set valuations for their catalogs, retain 100% of master and publishing rights, and receive instant, transparent payments whenever a fan collects a song. The platform emphasizes direct artist–fan relationships without intermediaries and rewards listeners for discovering and curating music. Fans can collect music, leave permanent comments, access group chats with artists and other collectors, and earn money by making playlists and sharing links. Sound launched to the public and plans to use new funding to expand operations and broaden its business reach. Sound.xyz builds web3 tools to help recording artists monetize their communities via NFTs. Its first product, Listening Parties, lets artists sell limited-edition NFTs tied to song releases. Early drops have been limited to a couple dozen NFTs that sold out and have generated roughly $10,000 in proceeds for artists. The company does not take a commission on those NFT sales. Sound.xyz is experimenting with features like enabling NFT holders to leave comments on streams and plans broader tools for fan crowdfunding and new incentive models for curators. CEO David Greenstein says the goal is to get music heard and get artists paid through new NFT-driven economics.

• Unique Network

  Participated · Equity · Oct 2021

  Unique Network builds infrastructure for the next generation of NFTs, positioning itself as the first NFT chain for Kusama and Polkadot. The platform aims to enable composable and advanced NFT features such as re-fungibility, nested NFTs, and dynamic-multiversal NFTs, and to reduce developer exposure to high transaction fees and siloed NFTs. Unique Network has partnered with projects including Art Curator Grid, XP Network, UN-Habitat, and SupraOracles, and created Polkadot’s first NFTs, Substrapunks. In April 2022 the project ran a crowdloan and secured a parachain slot on Polkadot, demonstrating strong community backing. The team plans to launch a governance and utility token, UNQ, to power NFT payments, smart contract transactions, staking mechanisms, voting, and reputation management. The company highlights community-driven growth and interoperability as core to scaling NFT adoption on Polkadot. Unique Network is a next-generation NFT chain built for Polkadot and Kusama that launched in July 2021. It offers developers independence from network-wide transaction fees and upgrades and provides a framework for more malleable, feature-rich NFTs. The team built Substrapunks, created Substrate’s pallet for NFTs, and won Hackusama in 2020. Unique is preparing to launch Quartz, its Kusama canary network parachain designed to enable advanced NFT functionality and cross-chain interoperability with Ethereum and EVM chains. The project has announced partnerships including the UN-led DigitalArt4Climate campaign with GloCha, RMRK, Art Curators Grid, and Forever Has Fallen. Financially, Unique Network raised $11.3M in a second pre-sale round, bringing total funding to $16M, with investors led by Outlier Ventures alongside The LAO, Flamingo, Nalu Capital and over 200 other investors. Unique Network is a custom parachain explicitly designed to support a next generation of NFTs on Polkadot and Kusama. Its core product includes a novel NFT pallet design and ownership restructuring to address gas, scalability, and interoperability issues present on Ethereum. The project has open-sourced basic components, including a white-label marketplace, minting tools, wallets, and galleries to let others deploy NFT solutions. Management says the platform aims to lower the education barrier, enable malleable interoperable NFTs, and expand use cases across art, gaming, and other industries. The company plans to finalize and launch its parachains on Kusama and Polkadot in the coming months and to bootstrap community-driven NFT commerce. Financially, Unique Network completed a $4.3 million first round of its pre-sale to fund development and community growth.

No current team members are available.