Minteo, a Latin America-based Non-Fungible Token (NFT) marketplace, raised $4.3 million in a seed round.
According to the team, the capital will fund the building of the platform, as well as gather talents from Colombia and Mexico. The company is also planning to expand their artist base to cover the entire South American region.
Along with several angel investors, here are the companies that joined the fundraise:
- Alliance DAO
- Big Brain Holdings
- CMT Digital
- Dune Ventures
- Fabric Ventures
- G20 Ventures
- Impatient VC
- OpenSea
- Zero Knowledge
OpenSea’s inclusion in the fundraising round is quite intriguing since they are currently the biggest NFT marketplace on the blockchain. Minteo Co-Founder and CMO William Duran explains that the company will provide OpenSea with a better way to create experiences for users.
“On OpenSea, there’s a bunch of categories, it’s hard to navigate and unless you’re in the top collection it’s hard to reach an audience if you’re a creator. We’re trying to simplify the user experience from the infrastructure part, while making it easier for them to access local content on mobile,” Duran told TechCrunch.
Along with its infrastructure, Minteo aims to prioritize local brands and creators. The team believes that will make the platform standout in a nascent market that already has several digital asset Marketplaces.
“The idea is to work with top artists in the region, the top 40-50 artists in each country. They don’t necessarily have to be involved with NFTs yet, this can be their gateway into it and we want to help artists get into NFTs,” Duran said.
The platform will also have a mobile wallet and fiat on-ramps to make all transactions more convenient even to ordinary users. According to Minteo Co-Founder and CEO Santiago Rodriguez, the team’s goal is to make things simpler and smartphone-oriented since “about 70% of Latin America commerce is mobile.”
The team is targeting October as the release date for Minteo’s beta version. If everything goes as planned, the platform should be available to the public in early 2023.
Some experts see Minteo’s presence as an effective vehicle for the region’s endless source of creative talent. The upcoming platform’s strength lies on its strong infrastructure and user-friendly interface. Moreover, Minteo’s presence can expose more Latin American artists to the world and provide fans more content to choose from.
“In Latin America, we’re all fun, great dancers and love music and arts. That’s when we realized, what’s taken off in NFTs so far is the cultural communities and that has a huge cultural opportunity for Latin America,” Rodríguez said. “But right now, crypto is difficult to get in the first place, a lot of exchanges don’t work well, only very technical people are using it. Outside of technical circles, usage is currently limited.”
Minteo is now the second NFT marketplace to emerge in the continent. In mid-March 2022, decentralized protocol RSK Infrastructure Network (RIF) announced Carnaval. It is the first-ever Latin American NFT marketplace on Bitcoin’s ($BTC) own blockchain.
What is Minteo?
Minteo is an upcoming LatAm-based NFT marketplace that focuses on infrastructure and support of artists in the region. Its founders include Sebastian Salazar, Santiago Rodríguez, Javier Lozano and William Durán. Salazar, Rodriguez, and Lozano previously co-founded Colombian payments gateway Wompi (a platform that full-service financial institution Bancolombia acquired).
The team is planning to launch Minteo in October, just in time for the Devcon event in Bogota, Colombia.
Minteo will join some of the latest innovative marketplaces for digital assets such as AQUA. Launched on September 28, 2022, AQUA is an NFT marketplace dedicated to Web3 gaming. Recently, the platform raised $10million from DIGITAL, a technology-focused investment firm led by billionaire Steven Cohen.
“We believe Minteo is on an exciting growth trajectory, led by a strong management team of highly experienced operators and visionaries and a unique strategy to bring Web3 to a Latin American community that is eager to gain exposure to Web3,” CMT Digital Investor Sam Hallene stated.
