Upshot, a blockchain-based protocol providing NFT appraisals, today announced a $22 million Series A2 funding round led by Polychain Capital. Polychain joins previous investors Framework Ventures, CoinFund, Blockchain Capital, Slow Ventures, Mechanism Capital, and Delphi Digital, among others.
The company plans to use the funds for additional research and development for its pricing models and to build out its growing team. The investment will also help Upshot finance its decentralized finance (DeFi) x NFT primitives, and create additional developer tools to allow others to build novel DeFi x NFT primitives leveraging Upshot’s price feeds.
Upshot said the overall value growth of NFTs – in terms of the user experience and crossover applications within DeFi – has been prevented by the notoriously difficult pricing mechanisms for the digital assets. Real-time, machine learning and expert-sourced appraisals are an intuitive, accurate approach to solving this critical problem.
“This past year has been one of explosive growth for NFTs, but the inefficient pricing mechanisms for these new assets has significantly limited their potential,” said Upshot co-founder and CEO Nick Emmons. “During that time period, we’ve been working tirelessly to build the best pricing models in the NFT space. We’re incredibly excited to partner with Polychain, one of the premiere crypto funds, as we embark on this next wave of development. With this fundraising round, we’ll be aggressively expanding our team, continuing to improve our industry-leading pricing models, and building out a suite of novel, exotic new primitives at the intersection of DeFi and NFTs.”
The intersection of DeFi and NFTs presents a new, high-growth vertical in the industry. The only way to unlock this vertical, however, is through real-time NFT price feeds, Upshot said. In order to limit volatility and price bubbles within NFTs and create liquid digital assets, issues with scalability and accuracy within the market need to be addressed. Providing the tools for reaching appraisals through industry experts unlocks this potential for DeFi x NFT primitives – including arbitrage, liquidity, leverage, and risk.
“Polychain is inspired by the vision of a collective intelligence platform rewarding its users for accurately modeling and pricing esoteric assets. Upshot provides deep insight into NFT markets and has already demonstrated the efficacy of their pricing models through industry-leading accuracy metrics, their appraisal of the Sotheby’s Bored Ape Yacht Club batch auction, and more,” said Olaf Carlson-Wee, founder and CEO of Polychain Capital. “Upshot is the premiere real-time appraisal market that will unlock the next wave of financial primitives for NFT markets.”
“At CoinFund, we are extremely excited to support this next financing of Upshot,” added Jake Brukman, founder at CoinFund. “Upshot’s appraisal and machine learning technology opens up best in class primitives for bringing liquidity and DeFi to the NFT space and is poised to dramatically expand the set of use cases of non-fungible assets.”