General Catalyst leads $7M investment in AR startup selling NFT jetpacks
After months of NFT mania and Facebook’s recent name change to Meta, it’s fair to say that “metaverse” chatter has reached a fever pitch. And while crypto investors are buying up avatars and digital swaths of land in hopes that a digital universe will spring up around these projects, it’s unclear which projects — if any — will stand the test of time.
Institutional investors are also making their bets on the NFT “metaverse.” Crypto startup Jadu, which has made millions of dollars selling pixelated NFT jetpacks and hoverboards, has scored $7 million in venture funding from General Catalyst with additional funding from Coinbase Ventures, The VR Fund, Sound Ventures and Guy Oseary, among others.
The startup’s virtual accessories can be used with other 3D avatars including Larva Labs’ Meebits and other wildly pricey NFTs like CyberKongz and DeadFellas. The avatars can be viewed and raced around in the company’s AR app The Mirrorverse, which the company hopes to eventually turn into a full-fledged Pokémon GO-like game.
The startup sold 6,666 NFT hoverboards for $4.4 million in Ethereum cryptocurrency over the weekend.Throughout the year, the NFT space has been mocked, but proponents think that the digital commodities are more than meets the eye, and that they allow creators to gain attention and fund projects that they might otherwise be unable to fund. Asad J. Malik, CEO of Jadu, notes that while demand for NFTs is high, the company is now focusing on expanding its broader platform.”Right now, we can milk people, like there’s enough interest if we want to say we’re releasing some avatar and we’re going to do like 1 ETH mints, and we can probably make $20-30 million like that,” Malik tells TechCrunch. “But that’s not sustainable and that’s distracting.” “We’re going to expand out the AR things because we have enough money.”
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