Metagood, a for-profit social impact NFT startup, has raised $5 million in its pre-seed round, the team exclusively told TechCrunch.
“We launched the company on the concept of using NFTs as an expression where everyone does good things for each other and the good stuff is tokenized and exchangeable,” Bill Tai, co-founder and chairman of Metagood, said to TechCrunch.
The company launched its flagship NFT collection OnChainMonkey to create tokenized value for community members. It also aims to give members the chance to promote and fund social good projects through its DAO, which raised 2,000 ETH in just one year, he added.
Its DAO distributed 70 ETH, or about $90,000 at current prices, to 42 projects across 10 weeks in its “Season 1,” Amanda Terry, co-founder of Metagood, said to TechCrunch. Some of its projects include funding the rehabilitation of a skate park in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, with art from OnChainMonkey, and helping Afghan refugees evacuate to Italy.
Investors in the recent funding round include Animoca Brands, Morgan Creek Capital founder and CEO Mark Yusko and Virgin Group investment manager Freddie Andrewes, to name a few.
“We appeal to a certain kind of person that wants to have a positive impact on the world,” Tai said. “Many of our investors have experienced good success in their careers and want to use their influence to do other good things in the world.”
Previous investors include a number of high-profile celebrities or executives, like actor Owen Wilson, Virgin Unite chair Holly Branson and Rotten Tomatoes co-founders Patrick Lee and Stephen Wang, as well as crypto investments from Dapper Labs co-founder Roham Gharegozlou, Axie Infinity co-founder Jeffrey Zirlin and The Sandbox co-founder Sebastien Borget, among others.
“Holly Branson sees this as a vehicle to extend what she’s doing,” Tai said. “That’s the common theme here. Culturally, we attract good-hearted people that want to lead the world into better places.”
The capital will be used toward growing the company, hiring new talent and building OnChainMonkey’s community and tools, Terry said. “We’ve been profitable off our pre-seed but we want to keep growing. We’re sitting on about over 4,600 ETH from our primary mint and secondary trading revenues.”
Metagood believes that web3 can be a positive force in creating an economy of good karma, where people are rewarded for doing good things, Tai said. The startup aims to combine rewards through charitable giving and the prices of the OnChainMonkey NFTs. “As the karma spreads, the economy grows.”
The DAO model allows for a maximum amount of funds to go toward projects — and fast, Tai said.
The skate park mentioned above is an example of a “micro charity grant that would be very hard to administer with a large organization, and we were able to pull that off within days,” Tai said.
“We want the rubber to meet the road between causes and giving, Tai said. “We can address things that large centralized charity organizations who have a lot of authorities can’t do. […] It wouldn’t surprise me if years from now we would be doing thousands of these a year.”