CXIP Labs Taps Celebrity Investments in $6.5M Round for NFT Development Suite

CXIP Labs, a protocol for minting – or producing – non-fungible tokens (NFT), said it raised $6.5 million in a seed round to launch Holograph, a suite of products targeted at NFT creators and enterprises.

The round was led by Courtside Ventures and Wave Financial, with participation from Gary Vaynerchuk’s Vaynerfund and celebrities Diplo, Gmoney, Pussy Riot’s Nadya and NFT artist Justin Aversano, according to a Tuesday press release.

The Holograph suite will include three initial products – Bridge, Core and Mint.

Bridge allows NFTs to be transferred between Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) blockchains. Core is a multichain application programming interface (API) for software developers, and Mint is a minting interface aimed at creators.

The CXIP Labs protocol has been used to deploy NFT drops from Sotheby’s Metaverse and Nifty Gateway, as well as the UkraineDAO NFT project, which raised almost $7 million to support Ukraine in its war against Russia.

“The CXIP Labs team has a proven background in supporting artists’ rights across creative industries, Web 3 fundamentals and a vision of the future for creators informed by some of the smartest people in Web 3,” Gary Vaynerchuk, founder of VaynerFund, said in the press release.

The project is tapping celebrity support from every angle, adding musicians Pharrell Williams and Joe Jonas to its advisory board.

Other participants in the round included the Arca NFT Fund, Infinity Ventures Crypto, Kenetic Capital, Mirana Ventures, Company Ventures, Avalaunch, Soma Capital, Kosmos VC and Palm Drive Capital.

CXIP Labs's last funding took place in July 2021, when it raised a $1.7 million seed round led by Mechanism Capital.

CORRECTION (April 27, 09:04 UTC): Corrects previous round's lead investor in last paragraph. Original named Courtside Ventures, which also participated.