Crypto firm MoonPay raises $87 million from Justin Bieber, Maria Sharapova, others

Cryptocurrency funds startup MoonPay has raised $87 million from greater than 60 high-profile buyers together with singer Justin Bieber, rapper Snoop Dogg, tennis participant Maria Sharapova and actor Bruce Willis because the position of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) in content material creation and fan engagement expands.

The investments are a part of the agency’s Collection A spherical, disclosed in November final yr which valued the corporate at $3.4 billion, MoonPay mentioned on Wednesday.

Greater than 600 crypto startups have seen over $12.5 billion in enterprise capital funding thus far this yr, in response to Alex McDougall, managing director at fund supervisor 3iQ Digital Belongings.

MoonPay, which gives fee infrastructure for crypto and NFT transactions, expects content material creators to more and more use NFTs to market their work and interact with followers, chief government officer Ivan Soto-Wright mentioned.

NFT is a sort of crypto asset that makes use of blockchain know-how to report who owns a digital file, which may very well be a picture, a video or a textual content.

Different buyers within the firm embody rapper Aubrey Drake Graham and Adel Future Nur’s firm Dreamcrew, Gwyneth Paltrow-led Kinship Ventures, Ashton Kutcher, Man Oseary-backed enterprise capital agency Sound Ventures, singer Abel Tesfaye, higher often known as The Weeknd and his supervisor Amir Esmailian.

Keep on high of technology and startup news that issues. Subscribe to our each day publication for the most recent and must-read tech information, delivered straight to your inbox.