Celebrity investors, KCRise Fund back $9M strategic seed for Overland Park NFT startup

Banking a $9 million round — including the backing of billionaire Mark Cuban, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, the co-founders of Rotten Tomatoes and regional venture capital firm KCRise Fund — CryptoSlam announced Wednesday a new wave of support for blockchain technology and a Kansas City startup operating within the open metaverse. 

Overland Park-based CryptoSlam, a leading provider of data and transparency for the NFT industry, closed the oversubscribed $9 million capital raise — led by Animoca Brands — on the heels of a significant year of growth for the company, as the global NFT landscape exploded in volume and expanded across multiple blockchains and use cases.

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CryptoSlam is a leading aggregator of non-fungible token (NFT) data from a growing list of popular blockchains, including Ethereum, Ronin, Solana, Flow, Polygon, WAX and many others. Launched in 2018 by a lifelong baseball card collector as a way to track the early Ethereum NFT collectible game MLB Champions, CryptoSlam has supported the NFT industry from its infancy by being the first to track and organize NFT data across multiple blockchains.

CryptoSlam rose to wide popularity as the first platform to track NBA Top Shot transactions on the Flow blockchain as it became massively popular in early 2021.

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Thousands of NFT enthusiasts, speculators and market watchers visit CryptoSlam each day to analyze NFT market trends and conduct deep analytics on a rapidly growing list of NFT collections, according to Randy Wasinger, founder and CEO of CryptoSlam.

“NFTs entered the mainstream this past year and are here to stay,” said Wasinger in a press release. “Since 2018, we’ve been laying the groundwork to provide ultimate transparency for the NFT industry, and this strategic capital raise marks a key milestone for us as we continue to grow along with it. We’re blessed to have Animoca Brands, Mark Cuban and an incredible list of other strategic investors aligned with us as we take this next step forward.”

The CryptoSlam team has grown to more than 20 team members including several recent key executive hires — among them: Clay Coffman, the co-founder of exited KC proptech startup Zego, who now serves as CryptoSlam’s chief product officer.

The $9 million investment is expected to be used to support an aggressive hiring plan, expand the development of the CryptoSlam platform for new and existing blockchains, and support the launch of several new products under the CryptoSlam brand such as an enterprise NFT data API, allowing developers to build on top of the platform.

Click here to learn more about CryptoSlam.

“I’m excited about what CryptoSlam has accomplished to be the de facto source of information and pricing on all things NFT,” said Cuban, the billionaire entrepreneur, “Shark Tank” co-host, and owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team.

Along with Cuban, the round included participation from fellow pre-seed investor Sound Ventures, the venture capital firm founded by Ashton Kutcher and Guy Oseary.

Other investors in the round include KCRise Fund, OKEx Blockdream Ventures, the venture arm of cryptocurrency exchange OKEx, blockchain protocols Binance Smart Chain and Polygon, PKO Investments, Stocktwits, Forte, Twenty5Twenty and Red Beard Ventures.

“One of the things that attracted us to CryptoSlam is they are proud to be a Kansas City company and raise the KC flag for Web3 and NFTs nationally,” said Ed Frindt, general partner. “KCRise Fund sees incredible value in being involved in one of the first venture-backed crypto/NFT startups in the region.”

“The talent opportunities for technical and non-technical roles will be immense, and the company values growing a core team in Kansas City,” he continued, expressing excitement about Coffman’s hire as CPO, two year’s after Zego’s exit from KCRise Fund’s portfolio. “We are excited to help KC become a leader in the [Web3 and NFT] sector.”

The round also saw participation from a long list of prominent founders including Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn), Mark Pincus (Zynga), Nigel Eccles (FanDuel), James Park (Fitbit), Randall Kaplan (Akamai Technologies), Alexandra Wilkis Wilson (Gilt.com), Kun Gao (Crunchyroll), Chris Wang (Playdom), Dennis Fong (Xfire), Greg Tseng (Tagged), Holly Liu (Kabam), Sebastien Borget (The Sandbox), and co-founders of Rotten Tomatoes, Stephen Wang and Patrick Lee.

CryptoSlam’s NFT collection rankings are recognized as a leading cross-blockchain indicator of interest in NFT collections, much like CoinMarketCap is for cryptocurrencies, according to the company. In addition, CryptoSlam’s NFT market data is frequently cited by media outlets including Forbes, Bloomberg, The Motley Fool, TechCrunch, Reuters, TheStreet, CNBC and many others.

“Cross-chain aggregation and analysis of NFT data are services essential to the development of the open metaverse, and CryptoSlam has clearly established itself as a leader in this area. We’re thrilled to support this talented team,” said Yat Siu, executive chairman and co-founder of Animoca Brands.