Portals is excited to announce a $5M seed round led by Greylock with participation from Multicoin Capital, Solana Ventures, Foundation Capital, Alameda Research, Sino Global Capital, Mantis VC (The Chainsmokers), Wave7, Cultur3 Capital, SkyVision Capital, and MonkeVentures. Individual investors such as Justin Kan (Twitch/Fractal), Robin Chan (Fractal), and David Grider (Greyscale) also joined the round.
The capital raised in this round will go towards growing the team to build out the Portals metaverse (starting with “Portals Downtown”) and the suite of tools and features for creators and builders in Portals.
Portals
Portals make it simple to build fun and immersive virtual experiences — such as games, entertainment, social spaces, or HQs— in a downtown metropolitan metaverse using a rich digital asset library and a simple drag-and-drop toolset. Once built, creators can invite others to join their spaces using a short link that immediately ports players to the space to hang out, play games, voice chat, watch videos, and more.
With a focus on a dense city center and zero-friction user experience, Portals quickly saw interest from hundreds of Web3 companies and brands. Prominent Solana-based projects, such as Audius, Magic Eden, and Raydium, as well as leading crypto exchanges FTX US and Binance.US, were among the first movers to announce spaces in Portals metaverse.
In addition to offering tools for building immersive experiences, Portals also provide interactive features for visitors to engage with when exploring spaces. For example, visitors can launch HTML games from inside a room, put up a poster, play music, walk over to an art gallery wall and inspect a digital painting, or strike up a conversation with a visitor in the space. Portals are extensible by design, and as more spaces are designed, more digital objects, experiences, and pathways can be created.
“We are building the metaverse in a browser-first way to make it as widely accessible as possible. With native voice chat and easy tools to customize spaces, we’re lowering the barrier to experience the metaverse. People are already creating spaces for town halls, art galleries, podcast studios, comedy clubs, underwater pirate bars, arcades, poker rooms, movie theaters and so much more.” — Adam Gomez, co-founder of Portals
“We see Portals as the most promising browser-based metaverse platform. It is a social space that you can explore, invest in, make your own, and gather with others. We’ve been blown away by the team’s velocity, quality and vision. Along with a growing community, they’re crafting a fun, dense virtual city people actually want to visit.” — Sarah Guo, partner at Greylock.
“Shared virtual spaces are becoming increasingly more important as workforces grow more internet-native and remote first. While easy to discount as a novelty or a toy, rich immersive virtual spaces are absolutely the next frontier of digital life and digital commerce. Portals is an extremely clever and elegant onboarding experience; it makes the metaverse universally accessible to billions of people through nothing more than a link. We’re excited to support this project, and to launch our digital headquarters in Portals soon.” — Kyle Samani, Managing Partner, Multicoin Capital.
Our Investors
With Greylock as lead investor (Facebook, LinkedIn, Discord, Instagram, Coinbase, Roblox, Airbnb, Dropbox, and more) Portals is getting a close partner that has some of the absolute best experience and track-record in the world when it comes to building and scaling tech products and platforms to hundreds of millions of people.
With MultiCoin Capital, Foundation Capital, Solana Ventures, Sino Capital, Alameda Research, Culture3, MonkeVentures, and angel investors Justin Kan, Robin Chain, and David Grider, then Portals is getting a second-to-none world-class group of advisors, partners, network within not only Solana but also the broader crypto ecosystem and the web3 space.
With MantisVC (The Chainsmokers) and Wave7, Portals is getting access to executives and artists that has a unique mix of global music and entertainment industry experience combined with a passion for technology and the web3/NFT space.
Next up: Downtown Portals and more
Portals minted on November 26th, 2021, and have since risen to be a top 5 Solana NFT project by volume and market cap. The beta of “Portals Spaces” (the “indoors”) for NFT holders was launched on December 26th, 2021.
The next phase for Portals include:
- Launching “Portals Downtown”, the city center in the Portals Metaverse.
- Affordable Citizen Cards (NFT) that give you access to a small Pod off-grid in the Portals World. Unlike Portals Spaces, Pods will have limited customization options but will be a place a personal space to display NFTs and invite a few friends. Stay tuned for the drop.
- Full new and upgraded in-game UI/UX and new Portals Avatars 2.0.
- Directory and discoverability mechanisms for Portals Spaces, and more owner tools, such as a marketplace for renting out Spaces.
Follow us on Twitter to stay updated, join our Discord for the early news.
