South Africa's NFTfi completes a $5M Serie A round

NFTfi has completed a successful Serie A raise of $5 million to continue the financialization of NFTs. The raise was led by existing investor and early-stage token fund 1kx alongside participation from Ashton Kutcher-led Sound Ventures, Maven 11, Collab Currency, Kleiner Perkins, and others.

The new round attracted participation from some new VCs with deep experience in DeFi, NFTs, and consumer products such as Sky Vision Capital, Reciprocal VC, Scalar Capital, and others. Among the leading angel investors were Sandy Heller, George Farha, and others.

The new funding will go towards building NFTfi’s financial infrastructure which is then used as collateral to receive loans from other borrowers against NFTs. Simply put, users and bring new NFT financial-focussed NFTs to market.

The South African startup was founded by Stephen Young in February 2020 is a marketplace where users can receive a cryptocurrency loan where their NFT’s back it up as collateral. The user will have to submit their NFT as part of the transaction. When the transaction is made, this NFT gets transferred to NFTfi’s smart contract which is highly secured from access.

Once the loan is paid with interest to the lender, the NFT goes back to the borrower’s wallet. NTFfi earns a 5% cut of the interest earned on every loan repaid. 1kx is an early-stage crypto fund helping founders bootstrap tokens and has supported NFTfi along its journey. You can get more information about it on Twitter.

More details on the raise are on TechCrunch