- Fair.xyz is a new startup that hopes to make the NFT minting process more “accessible.”
- Its cofounders left their jobs at Instagram, Meta, and Goldman Sachs in January.
- In August, they announced a $4.55 million seed round. Read their 13-page pitch deck.
Back in June, startup Fair.xyz made headlines after a Snoop Dogg look-alike was spotted in the crowds at NFT.NYC conference.
It wasn’t actually Snoop Dogg. It was Doop Snogg, an impersonator hired by Fair.xyz as a stunt to shed light on the rampant fraud and deception within the NFT industry.
“We used Doop Snogg as a fun way of highlighting our goal of removing imposters, bots, and fraud away from the NFT space,” the London-based startup told Insider in June.
Fair.xyz hopes to build an end-to-end, code-free Web3 platform to help creators and collectors mint NFTs as an entry point into the industry. A core focus of the startup is preventing “gas wars” that hike up transaction costs, as well as keeping bots at bay with its “smart contract” and “proprietary smart queueing technology,” according to the startup.
Last week, Fair.xyz announced its first round of financing: a $4.55 million Seed Round with participation from Eden Block NFX, First Minute Capital, and OpenSea.
Its founders, a team of three engineers, left their jobs at Instagram, Meta, and Goldman Sachs to build Fair.xyz in January. By March, the startup had begun the process of seeking financing and drafted up a pitch deck to send to investors, cofounder Isaac Bentata told Insider.
But the timing for Fair.xyz wasn’t ideal — they launched headfirst into a cooling NFT market.
While NFT sales hit their peak in 2021, by mid-April, weekly NFT sales plunged 53%, according to data from NonFungible.com. That decline continued into the summer.
Fair.xyz’s founders didn’t shy away from this topic when they were raising money.
“We were very upfront that we think that the main reason people buy NFTs right now is to try and make money,” cofounder Isaac Kamlish said. “It’s going to actually take a lot of work to move that use-case away from financial speculation to actual utility.”
To further complicate the market, a broader economic downturn had also cast a shadow over the tech industry.
“People don’t like pitches that are all dandy,” Bentata said. “The reality is that there will be problems. It’s just better if you have a bit of foresight and are able to predict them, so you can deal with them accordingly when they come up.”
With the economic factors at play, Fair.xyz had to adjust their fundraising expectations. Meanwhile, VCs and investors were encouraging the founders to think small and strategic.
“We had no idea how much we wanted to get,” Kamlish said regarding the dollar sign Fair.xyz had its eyes set on.
“It’s easy to be greedy now and go for the headlines,” Kamlish added. “But the big issue you have is, there’s a downturn as we’ve seen now in the past few months, raising another round is super hard.”
Their $4.5 million round is enough to build out the company and its product without unrealistic expectations and pressure, Kamlish said.
Read the 13-page pitch deck Fair.xyz used to land their recent seed round:
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