Freeverse.io — the next step
Today we are delighted to be announcing a major milestone in the growth of our company — the completion of our €10M Series A funding round. We’d like to give a huge “thank you” to everyone who has supported us since we founded the company in 2019.
We’d also like to thank our new and existing investors: Earlybird Venture Capital and Target Global for leading the round, and Adara Ventures and 4Founders Capital for continuing their support. We’re also very grateful for the backing of football media giant OneFootball.com (and their CEO, Lucas von Cranach), international football star Mario Götze, TravelPerk CEO Avi Meir, and serial fintech entrepreneur Maex Ament.
When we founded Freeverse three years ago, we were convinced that ownership of digital items was going to become ‘a thing’. We worked hard on developing the technological building blocks to enable a new way of creating real value for digital assets, beyond speculation.
With this funding round, we have reached a critical moment for our company, as we start to see greater adoption of our technology and wider awareness of our ideas.
While we’re proud to be growing our team, our mission at Freeverse remains what it always has been: bringing real, long-term value to the concept of digital ownership.
This is what we’re going to use this funding for:
Bring Real Value to Web3 Digital Ownership
NFTs, and digital ownership in general, have now begun to enter the public consciousness. And we’re delighted to see several amazing applications that have been built using ‘NFT 1.0’ tech. But we think that there is so much more to do. There is a more sustainable way, both in terms of business model and environmental impact, of using digital ownership to create long-term value, both for companies and end-users.
Our ‘Living Asset’ approach to NFTs allows assets to evolve and change based on how they are used. It means what you actually do with your NFT affects its utility — both to you and to other people.
Brands and game developers can define the rules for how the Living Asset will evolve. With this approach, the value of the NFT is driven by its utility instead of pure speculation.
And because our technology allows Living Assets to be created and evolved at scale, it drives a deep transformation of current NFT business models: moving away from the concept of maximising an initial sale price through artificial scarcity, and towards a “free to play” paradigm, where Living Assets are acquired for free, and their market value becomes a reflection of the effort and engagement dedicated to them by users.
As a result, the Living Assets approach charts a less volatile, and more scalable and eco-friendly future for NFTs and the whole concept of digital ownership.
Finally, we want to make sure that we’re building evolving assets in the ‘right’ way. Some ‘dynamic’ NFT approaches store the actual data of the asset on a centralised, private server — which could be taken down, crash, or even be hacked. When you purchase such an asset you are, to all intents and purposes, “buying a web link.”
At Freeverse, all the data associated with the NFT is verified and certified by the underlying blockchain. It means that users can be 100% sure of the validity of their digital portfolio, tracing and verifying the history of any asset’s evolution through time. It also means that any smart contract can access an asset’s properties — opening the door to entire new ecosystems of decentralised applications.
Grow our team
Freeverse is, and always will be, a tech-focused company. For the last three years, we have been working on a completely new way of solving the technological problem of dynamic NFTs, in a scalable and certifiable way. But great technology does not necessarily mean a great product, and a great product is meaningless if nobody knows about it.
Therefore, we will be tripling the size of the team, with a particular focus on expanding our product and go-to-market teams. We’ll also be increasing our presence at events and conferences. We are looking forward to establishing new partnerships as well as continuing the relationship with our existing ones. And we’ll refine our communication to deliver the message that Living Asset NFTs are the long-term solution for meaningful digital ownership.
This growth comes with an inherent challenge. As a relatively small team so far, we are proud to have forged a strong culture, built on three of our most important company values: Trust, Honesty, and Empathy. As we grow, our existing team will become ambassadors for that culture — making sure that new members are welcomed and supported, and setting an example to ensure that the great working relationships and environment that we already have are maintained.
Support and grow with our clients
We are beyond excited to have signed agreements with some amazing companies that we are proud to be working alongside — and we’ll be announcing many of these in the coming weeks and months.
Freeverse’s products are inherently technical in nature, and there are only so many ways that you can try to make API documentation sexy! Working with such creative and innovative companies is not only a pleasure and an honour, but it enables us to see our technology “in the wild” — being used by people. And this, ultimately, is what drives us all at Freeverse.
We believe that Freeverse’s vision, technology, and products will become a gateway to the world of meaningful digital ownership for thousands of applications, and millions of users.
We are incredibly excited about what’s next — and grateful for all the amazing support we have received.
Alun, Toni, Alessandro, and Ferran.
