MakersPlace Proposes $30 Million From Eminem And Bessemer

In 2020, CMO and the co-founder of MakersPlace, Ryoma Ito, approached Christie’s auction house with some ideas. MakersPlace is a startup that creates and sells NFTs non-fungible tokens.

MakersPlace proposed an idea that it would create an NFT of the artist Beeple’s project collage called The First 5000 Days. And later, Christie’s auction would sell it as if it were a painting by a taEverydayme. Christie’s auction agreed, and later, in March, the artwork went on sale for more than $69 million. It was almost equal to the amount Los Angeles’ Getty Museum spent on a painting by Edouard Manet. During the auction, the buyer seemed primed and ready to go. Ito approached him with his idea of bidding, and MetaKovan seemed interested in it.

At this time, MakersPlace was almost a three-year-old company that was considered the brainchild of Pinterest employees Yash Nelapati, Dannie Chu, and Ito. They had more than $2 million in seed funding, which is a small amount for a software company.

People involved in this idea

Former CEO of Sotheby, Bill Ruprecht, and Eminem decided to invest.  

Bessemer, an asset manager, focused on blockchain, led MakersPlace’s next round, helping to raise $30 million that would allow both to compete with OpenSea. 

CEO of the invite-only platform, Chu, said that nobody could imagine a future with more and better digital art and more people building it without creating an economy for these people.

Chu`s platform has a policy of taking around a 15% cut of creators’ and artists’. That resulted in more than $100 million in sales and nearly $15 million in revenues this year. The cut is significantly less compared to most physical galleries that take the commission of around 50%.

The new introduction of capital might also help MakersPlace progress in its goal of getting rid of blockchain on its platform, guaranteeing that the artists who take credit for specific works and profit from it are the creators of these works.