Mike Dudas' VC firm, NFT App Floor, closes a $8 million Series A round
Floor, an app that promises to make non-fungible tokens (NFT) more intelligible and accessible, has secured $8 million in a Series A investment.
6th Man Ventures, the venture capital firm founded by The Block founder Mike Dudas, led the investment. B Capital, Worklife Ventures, Collab+Currency, Hannah Grey, Crypto.com, Exponent Capital, and Eberg Capital are among the other investors in the round.
Floor was created in October 2021 by CEO Chris Maddern, who previously headed Venmo's mobile division and now serves on the board of crypto newspaper The Block. Siddhartha Dabral, Chief Technology Officer, and Christine Brown, Chief Operating Officer, joined the company after leaving her former position as Robinhood's (HOOD) Crypto COO.
NFT portfolio tracking, real-time price notifications, live collection activity, and multi-wallet compatibility are all available through Floor. The option to build an NFT watch list and estimated values to help guide buying and selling decisions are among the upcoming capabilities.
"When it comes to crypto, I'm a really savvy man." In an interview with CoinDesk, Maddern said, "I was trying to get into NF Ts, and it was still really difficult." "It gets more punishing and complex as you go deeper because you have to understand not just the worth of your assets, but also the utility of your assets, what's going on inside each of those groups."
Launch of the App to the General Public
Floor has been a token-gated experience, requiring community members to pay an NFT in order to use the app. Onboarding is a manual procedure that takes place in Discord.
While that structure began to grow the community and earn $2 million in investment, Floor needed to do more planning to create a public platform that could scale for a bigger audience while still providing benefits to token holders. Maddern anticipates a late summer or early fall introduction of the public app.
Brown, a Robinhood veteran, brings her experience scaling products for a big community to the table. Last year, while Robinhood began expanding its asset transfer offerings, Brown had concerns about how to engage such a huge audience early and safely. She noticed Maddern on Twitter discussing similar concerns, contacted out, and said after the initial discussion, "I need to work with this individual." Brown chose to leave Robinhood to help develop Floor after the conversations persisted.
"Traditional finance and spot crypto trading are mostly used for financial speculation. Brown told CoinDesk, "You put money in and hope that money is worth more when you pull it out." "Right now, one of the key use cases [of NFTs] is financial investment and speculation, but with everything from utility to access to memberships, I believe this is going to be the field that eventually eclipses everything else is going on."
Creating a community
Floor will utilize the funds to publish the public app, which will eliminate the NFT purchase restriction, which may be a barrier to access for some customers. A larger user base can give Floor greater clout when it comes to developing collaborations with other NFT companies, as well as provide a broader pool of feedback on which NFT projects are generating the most buzz.
"We want to move away from a model in which we have a very exclusive community and toward one in which we can continue to create and foster that community," Maddern said. "Moving away from token sales as the primary model requires everyone to be able to utilize the app."
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