Startup powering Sotheby’s Metaverse raises $20 million in funding

Mojito, the startup supporting Sotheby’s Metaverse, announced Thursday that it raised $20 million in its first funding round, bringing its total valuation to $100 million. 

Future Perfect Ventures led the round, with participation from Moore Strategic Ventures, CMT Digital, Sfermion and Ancient. 

Mojito helps its users sell NFTs from their own storefronts or websites. Its services include minting NFTs, ensuring compliance and enabling perpetual royalties, said Amanda Cassatt, co-founder of the Web3 marketing firm and venture studio Serotonin, which created Mojito. 

“Having worked with this team [Mojito] for the last several months, we are excited to partner with Mojito to power the Sotheby’s Metaverse and to create a platform for others to explore the possibilities of NFTs,” said Sotheby’s CEO Charles Stewart in a statement. “Sotheby’s is in a unique position to apply our expertise and curatorial insight to the burgeoning world of digitally native art and the Mojito partnership will only expand our capabilities.” 

The first sales from Sotheby’s new NFT platform, Sotheby’s Metaverse, will come from a collection of 53 NFTs from 19 collectors including Pranksy, j1mmy.eth and Paris Hilton. 

Sotheby’s first auction off an NFT in April of this year when it sold art from the anonymous digital artist Pak for $17 million. The art auction house then went on to sell a rare CryptoPunk NFt for $11.8 million on June 11, an NFT of the original World Wide Web code for $5.4 million on June 30 and a collection of 101 Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs for $24.4 million before finally launching its own NFT platform last week.

About Author

MK Manoylov has been a reporter for The Block since 2020 — joining just before bitcoin surpassed $20,000 for the first time. Since then, MK has written nearly 1,000 articles for the publication, covering any and all crypto news but with a penchant toward NFT, metaverse, web3 gaming, funding, crime, hack and crypto ecosystem stories. MK holds a graduate degree from New York University's Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program (SHERP) and has also covered health topics for WebMD and Insider. You can follow MK on X @MManoylov and on LinkedIn.