Today, Doodles, a company that makes colorful profile pictures, got $54 million in equity funding from Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian’s 776. This is despite the fact that the non-fungible token (NFT) market is generally bad. Acrew Capital, FTX Ventures, and 10T Holdings also helped raise money.
Doodles, which only recently started minting its pastel NFTs, has amassed one of the internet’s greatest collections of profile pictures. According to NFTPriceFloor, the 10,000-image collection is valued at around $121 million overall. Bored Ape Yacht Club, the leading NFT series, with a market capitalization of $1.27 billion.
The Doodles series is based on 100 visual characteristics that were combined and matched in various ways to create one-of-a-kind artwork. Although some have sold for as much as 296.69 eth (about $1.1 million at the time of sale), others have been purchased for as low as 6.9 eth ($12,183).
The most valuable Doodle ever sold, #6914, is one of the rarest and has unique primate characteristics in addition to gold coloration.
The firm intends to use the profits of its capital infusion, which it claims would raise its valuation to $704 million, to expand in the NFT industries of music and gaming, which are drawing increasing attention.
The overall value of NFT prices and trade has fallen recently. Only $191 million was transferred throughout August, down from a peak of roughly $3.5 billion in trades in May, according to data from The Block.
But Doodles have been swimming against the current. Major NFT collections have been affected significantly harder, even though the collection’s transaction volume is still down 6.41% over the past 30 days. While CryptoPunks, the second-largest NFT collection by market value ($1.09 billion), is down a startling 77%, Bored Ape Yacht Club is down 40%. The fall in NFT transactions has been attributed to a combination of the bear market and a move away from risky investments.
Ohanian, a pioneering Doodles collector, first introduced Doodles to Katelin Holloway, a founding partner of 776 and Doodles board member. But she wasn’t attracted in by the brand’s varied community until she met the Doodles team at SXSW the previous year.
According to Doodles CEO Julian Hoguin, Doodles is attempting to grow both internally and outside by learning from Holloway’s skills as an HR professional.
“As we scale and we scale rapidly,” adds Hoguin, “having her as a sounding board and as a true partner is going to be invaluable because we want to be built on culture, we want to elicit joy and creativity.”Since its inaugural mint in October, Doodles has shown a strong history of community integration. When the collection first launched, management made the contentious choice to shut down its Discord channel at 1,000 users, a move that might have been anticipated to turn off prospective collectors.Contrarily, the action led to buzz within the burgeoning NFT community, which raised the artworks’ profile and had the opposite impact. Presently, the collection has well-known collectors including Justin Bieber, DJ Steve Aoki, and businessman Gary Vee.
Since then, the team has kept in touch with its collectors, letting Doodles owners sell their NFTs for up to $100,000 before demanding a licensing agreement, and even recruiting the owners and designers of the derivative works of art as illustrators.
“We’re very keen on actually developing other people’s opportunities to utilize their characters in their own commercial efforts,” says Hoguin. “It just needs to be controlled.”
In June, Doodles hired the singer Pharrell Williams as its chief brand officer. This made it possible for blockchain technology to be used in different ways. Holguin says that music NFTs are a way to get people interested in Web3, which is a new model for the internet that is based on blockchains and is still in its early stages.
“We want to create products for our core collector base, but at the same time utilize these great forms of marketing like music, to introduce new people to Web3 and onboard them into the Doodles ecosystem,” he adds.
In the upcoming six months, Doodles’ musical NFT project will be made public in collaboration with Columbia Records. The business would only disclose that it involved a song with “an underlying adaption experience” for NFT holders and that it would receive radio play and streaming exposure.
Gaming-related NFTs, Doodles’ second area of focus, have surpassed the art and collectibles hype train of 2021 to become the most traded variety. The Block data shows that in August, 77% of weekly NFT sales were made up of gaming tokens.
Space Doodles, the gaming branch of the company, will try to make it easier for people to join the Doodles ecosystem. The company says that users will be able to buy characters and animations with credit cards instead of having to use cryptocurrency.
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