Recently launched Meme.com has raised $5 million from blockchain-focused venture capital funds including Outlier Ventures, Digital Finance Group, Morningstar, Blockhype, Spark Digital Capital and other investors.
The firm said Thursday that over a dozen investors contributed to the round, with additional funding coming from angel investors Gabby Dizon, CEO of Altitude Games, and Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal.
With so-called memecoins like dogecoin and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) having soared in popularity in recent months, the company said it aims to bridge the two markets.
Meme.com sets out to unite meme markets and trends with “memetic tokens,” NFTs and digital art.
Users are able to mint tokens based on the perceived value of the meme they represent, while others can stake the tokens.
The firm said content around each meme is crowdsourced by the community and the most popular memes receive rewards that include special NFT art.
“We believe that memes and meme markets, such as Meme.com, are a promising and innovative way to empower users who find or create trends,” said Joanna Liang, head of investment at Digital Finance Group.
CoinMarketCap for memes
Meme.com co-founder Mattias Tyrberg, who goes by the title “Sir Stonks,” told CoinDesk the $5 million funding will be used for further development of the platform, marketing and user growth.
“We have long-term plans and with this funding we have secured the project for many years,” said Tyrberg.
The platform will also offer data tracking for the memes, allowing their value to be compared over time. A press statement the platform wants to be “like a CoinMarketCap for memetic content.”
“We collect data on the popularity of a meme both from external and internal sources,” said Tyrberg. “External can be number of mentions or image shares.”
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Meme.com, which launched on May 24, already has a platform called Marble.Cards for creating and collecting cards based on websites, which provides a lot of meme data, he added.
Data points decide where the staking rewards will go. “This influences the users to trade fairly towards the market trend, explained Tyrberg.