Startup Zora has raised $50 million for its NFT tooling protocol, the company announced Thursday.
The round was led by Haun Ventures with participation from Coinbase Ventures and Kindred Ventures and values Zora at $600 million, according to a press release. It's the first use of capital from the recently formed Web 3 Venture firm, which is led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) alumni Katie Haun.
Zora's NFT protocol is publicly available and focused on providing accessible tools for creating NFT collections and independent marketplaces for aspiring artists and businesses.
The protocol has been used behind the scenes for a handful of popular NFT moments in the past year, including the $4 million sale of a DOGE NFT last September and the NFT dating show "Mad Realities," which debuted in April.
"OpenSea is to Amazon what Zora is to Shopify," the company said in a press release, referring to the industry-leading marketplace that received a $13.3 billion valuation in January.
Zora also has its own decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) in the works, called Zora DAO.
Haun raised $1.5 billion from investors in March to deploy with two separate crypto funds, one for early-stage crypto startups and the other as an accelerator.
"NFTs are a key building block central to the future of the Web," Sam Rosenblum, a partner at Haun Ventures, said in the statement. "We also see Web 3 innovations like NFTs as a positive force for openness and decentralization in a Web that is currently too focused on centralized, opaque gatekeepers."
Zora raised $8 million in a March 2021 stock sale, after raising $2 million the previous October.