NFT marketplace Minteo snags $4.3M seed-round

Latin American-based NFT marketplace Minteo secured $4.3 million seed funding to expand through the region. Investors in the round include Fabric Ventures, Dune Ventures, CMT Digital, Impatient VC, Susquehanna Private Equity Investments, SevenX Ventures, FJ Labs, Big Brain Holdings, G20 Ventures, Alliance DAO, Zero Knowledge and several angel investors.

Competitor OpenSea Ventures also participated in the round, even though their NFT marketplace is the largest in the space.

Led by CEO Santiago Rodriguez, and CTO Javier Lozano, Minteo is an NFT marketplace focused on enabling Latin American-based artists, creators, collectors, gamers, brands and other community members to buy, sell and trade digital art, collectibles, phygitals, and other digital assets to a global market. It offers a mobile app that makes buying, selling and trading digital assets simple by offering a built-in self-custodied wallet, the option to pay using local payment methods, and a marketplace with local content.

“On OpenSea there’s a bunch of categories, it’s hard to navigate and unless you’re in the top collection it’s hard to reach an audience if you’re a creator,” William Duran, CMO of Minteo said in interview to TechCrunch. “We’re trying to simplify the user experience from the infrastructure part, while making it easier for them to access local content on mobile.”

Minteo plans to stand out in the NFT space through its infrastructure and focus on working with local artists and brands, among other things.

Rodriguez and Lozano are joined by William Duran and Sebastian Salazar, Chief Marketing Officer and Chief Operating Officer, respectively, who each bring over a decade of experience leading go-to-market operations for fast-growing B2B and B2C companies across the US and Latin America, including EasyTaxi, a leading taxi hailing app that was acquired by Cabify.

The capital will be used to build up the platform, get artists on board from Colombia and Mexico then over time expand into other Latin American countries.