Pinata, a leading NFT distribution platform, announced it has raised $21.5M in seed and Series A funding. The Series A was co-led by Greylock and Pantera, and the seed was co-led by Greylock and Offline Ventures. Additional investors include Volt Capital, Opeasea, and Alchemy. Pinata provides the media infrastructure for the vast majority of the NFT space, supporting marketplaces, metaverses, web3 apps, and NFT projects across all blockchains. Pinata will use the funds to continue investment in their technology infrastructure, and to expand the team.

NFTs are the origin stories for any piece of data, giving creators the ability to transfer content between people, earn income, and restrict access however they see fit. Realizing early on that NFTs would change how the world views data and ownership, Kyle Tut (CEO) and Matt Ober (CTO) founded the earliest version of Pinata at ETH Berlin in 2018, winning the event’s hackathon. Staying true to their midwestern roots, Kyle and Matt continued to build Pinata out of their hometown of Omaha, bootstrapping the company for the first few years and designing a product that could withstand NFT hype and grow to meet the increasing needs of web3 creators.

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“Legacy tools for creators all serve a great purpose for discovery and awareness, but fall short when it comes to building an authentic community and earning direct income. Creators need storage capabilities and a fast and powerful way to distribute their content across marketplaces, metaverses, social media, and the internet en masse,” says Kyle Tut, CEO & Founder of Pinata. “Pinata empowers creators of all kinds to serve content at scale without any technical experience required.”

Pinata lets creators build across any blockchain with a suite of tools to manage and serve content with super-fast uploading, streaming, and sharing. With over 200 server locations around the world, Pinata’s built-in content delivery network (CDN) lets users serve content quickly, reliably, and securely. Pinata’s pinning service supports any form of uploadable content – from videos, images, music, apps, to entire marketplaces – without limits, and tailored to every creator’s preferred style of content.

Pinata’s most recent feature additions include Dedicated Gateways, enabling creators to have custom branded, private IPFS nodes that fetch content quicker than the public network, and Submarining, which allows creators to make any content pinned to Pinata (and shared across blockchains) unlockable. With Submarining, users can share exclusive content with their followers based on parameters such as NFT ownership, time-sensitive, geo-location, and more.

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In the last year, Pinata has seen strong revenue growth, up 42X year over year. Today, more than 240,000 users worldwide rely on Pinata, up from 104,000 users in January. Pinata works with notable companies like Opensea, DraftKings, Protocol Labs, Yuga Labs, Autograph and LooksRare, and users have 120M+ files pinned. Pinata early adopters have used the product to build well-known platforms and web3 projects such as Bueno.Art, DappRadar, Curio, Tokenproof, Sound XYZ and NiftyLit.

“While today’s NFT activity is focused around static .jpeg files, we believe this is just the tip of the iceberg for this technology and that the most interesting applications around NFTs involve richer media,” said Mike Duboe, Partner at Greylock. “Pinata is the most full-featured offering to help creators and marketplaces program more advanced functionality into this media. The team has been refreshingly “anti-hype” since we led the seed round about a year ago, and watching their revenue growth has been impressive since then. We are thrilled to lead another round as the team builds infrastructure that is mission-critical to all NFT projects and platforms.”

“It was clear from the first time I used Pinata’s services that it’s one of the most robust and easy-to-use media storage and distribution platforms for web3 businesses on the market. This is supported by not only their impressive growth in market share but the partnerships they’ve achieved with many of the most recognizable brands in the space,” said Lauren Stephanian, Partner at Pantera Capital. “We’re so excited to partner with Pinata and co-lead this round alongside Greylock. We look forward to seeing the positive impact Pinata will have on many of the teams building in crypto.”

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