Adreessen Horowitz, a venture capital firm, announced that it is leading a $50 million seed round for Gary Vaynerchuk’s NFT project, VeeFriends. This news comes as a bright spot in an otherwise challenging funding landscape for digital asset-focused startups.

VeeFriends was launched by Gary Vaynerchuk, celebrity influencer and CEO of VaynerMedia, in May 2021.

VeeFriends wants to use the money to develop its intellectual property (IP) across both physical and digital platforms for the 283 VeeFriends characters.

Gary Vaynerchuk drew each Veefriends cartoon animal in the style of doodle art, with specific human attributes attributed to them. Seventeen such characters are featured on a special edition deck of UNO. 

The first VeeCon conference was held in Minneapolis this May, and each NFT token from the Veefrinds collection granted attendees access to the event.

There are three tiers of tokens, with distinct levels of access to VeeCon and Gary Vaynerchuk, and the color of the background affects rarity.

VeeFriends revenue $258,142,000 on today’s valuation of Ethereum

VeeFriends revealed that the collection had made roughly 200,000 ETH from both primary and secondary sales since it launched. OpenSea stated that this places the VeeFriends’ collection in the top 30 most popular collections of all time based on trading volume.

Vaynerchuk’s investment fund, VaynerFund, was one of the leading investors in a new protocol called Co:Create. This protocol is designed to support the growth of NFT projects and enable them to launch their own native tokens. The spin-off collection VeeFriends Series 2 with new characters was released earlier this year as part of the utility for the collectible trading card game included in the second series.

Maybe you should start thinking about making your 50 million by having an NFT strategy