A16z crypto leads US$ 50M funding round for VeeFriends NFTs

Venture capital firm Adreessen Horowitz (a16z) is leading a US$ 50 million seed funding round for Gary Vaynerchuk’s NFT project, VeeFriends. The fund will help VeeFriends expand its ‘creative, technical, and experiential operations’ to bolster the growth of the Web 3 ecosystem.

Social media entrepreneur and VaynerMedia CEO Gary Vaynerchuk, or Gary Vee, launched VeeFriends in May 2021. He produces motivational and business-educational content on Youtube. 

The NFT collection features child-like doodles of animal characters based on ‘meaningful attributes’ like tolerance, patience, and authenticity, which Vaynerchuk highlights in his content to inspire his community. 

VeeFriends plans to use the seed funding to expand its intellectual property (IP) across physical and digital platforms of the 283 VeeFriends characters and recruit more staff to its team, according to a Medium post.

A16z general partner Chris Lyons expressed his support for the backing of VeeFriends and its Web3 ventures. ‘We look forward to helping the team fuel expansion plans for its creative, technical and experiential operations that support the growing Web3 community!’ he wrote in a Twitter post. 

Apart from being a popular NFT project, VeeFriends also offers offline and IRL utility via curated experiences such as conferences. In May this year, the VeeCon conference successfully brought together more than 7,000 attendees to discuss Web3 and network within the VeeFriends community.

The NFT collection has also generated over 200,000 ETH in primary and secondary sales, making it the top 30 collections in terms of trading volume on OpenSea. 

Photo: Twitter: @ChrisLyons