Quick take:
- Story Protocol has announced a $29.3 million seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz.
- The fundraising also attracted participation from Hashed, Mirana Corp, DAO5, Samsung Next Fund, Two Small Fish Ventures, Berggruen, and SLVC.
- Story Protocol will use the funds to accelerate the development of its web3 infrastructure platform.
Web3 startup Story Protocol has announced a $29.3 million funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto fund A16z Crypto. The seed round also attracted participation from Korean crypto-focused venture capital firm Hashed, Samsung Next Fund, Two Small Ventures, DAO5, Berggruen Holdings, Mirana Corp and SLVC, among others.
According to an Accounting and Corporate Regulatory Authority (ACRA) filing, A16z invested $10 million in Story Protocol through its CNK Seed Fund, DealStreetAsia reported.
The web3 startup’s top leadership team consists of Seung Soo Kim, who according to Pitchbook is a co-founder and Chief Executive Officer. However, his LinkedIn profile describes his position as Chief of Staff. Kim is joined by Jason Levy and Jason Zhao as co-founders, while Ben Sternberg is listed as the company’s Chief Financial Officer.
According to Pitchbook, Story Protocol was founded in 2022. Before founding the web3 startup, Kim founded Radish Fiction, a storytelling app that Korean social media giant Kakao bought for $440 million in 2021.
On the other hand, Jason Levy held senior positions at tech giants Amazon and Apple before setting up his own startup World Between Worlds, an entertainment app that allowed users to visit virtually visit real-world places inside their mobile phones, while Jason Zhao was a product manager at Google’s AI subsidiary DeepMind.
Ben Sternberg was the Chief Financial Officer at Radish Fiction before joining Story Protocol in September last year.
Story Protocol’s fundraising comes amid the perception that the crypto market is in a bearish mode. Funding for web3 startups has significantly declined since June 2022.
The metaverse industry has also seemingly faced a decline amid a series of layoffs from some of the leading players including Meta Platforms, Microsoft and the Chinese entertainment giant Tencent.
Story Protocol describes a developer of a web3 technology designed to revolutionize how narrative universes are created.
Based on its Pitchbook profile, “the company’s platform offers a way to create, govern, and license intellectual property on-chain and form an ecosystem of story legos that can be remixed and composed, enabling creators to build a narrative story with ownership and incentive.”
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