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MakersPlace is an American online non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace. The company was founded by Pinterest employee no. 1, Yash Nelapati, Dannie Chu, and Ryoma Ito in 2018. The popular NFT platform was founded with the mission "to create a platform that incentivizes creators by giving them ownership over the work they produce.”

MakersPlace offers a marketplace allowing for non-fungible tokens to be sold directly at a fixed price or through an auction, based on the Ethereum ERC-721 standard. In 2021, following a heightened interest in non-fungible tokens — helped along by the $69.3MM Beeple x Christie's sale facilitated by MakersPlace — MakersPlace closed their $30MM Series A funding round, led by Bessemer Venture Partners and Pantera Capital with additional investors including Sony Music Entertainment, Eminem, and Coinbase Ventures. MakersPlace has sold NFTs by Beeple, Pak... History The founders' experiences at Pinterest influenced their decision to venture into the then-quite-opaque and the very nascent world of rare digital art validated through blockchain. Regarding the initial inspiration behind MakersPlace, co-founder Dannie Chu — who spent six years leading growth engineering at Pinterest — wrote, “[Millions of digital creators’] work is getting printed, copied, shared, and ultimately they make very little money from it being put online. If you can’t create a sustainable model for digital creators to create, you’re not going to have art.” (Ref) MakersPlace launched in beta in August 2018. On April 24, 2019, after a year of beta testing, the MakersPlace site officially launched with the announcement of its closed Seed Funding round, which was led by Uncork Capital with participation from Draper Dragon Fund, Abstract Ventures, and a number of high-profile angel investors and early leaders from companies like: Pinterest, Facebook and Coinbase. (Ref) On March 11, 2021, MakersPlace facilitated the sale of Everydays: The First 5000 Days, a digital collage by artist Beeple (aka Mike Winkelmann), which made history as the highest-priced NFT ever sold at the time, dwarfing the previous record of $6.6MM. (Ref) On August 8, 2021, MakersPlace announced it closed a $30MM Series A round of funding, led by Bessemer Venture Partners and Pantera Captial with participation from Uncork Capital, Draper Dragon Digital Assets, 9Yards Capital, Coinbase Ventures and Sony Music Entertainment. The funding also included the following strategic investors: Acquavella Galleries, Sabrina Hahn and Bill Ruprecht in the arts; Eminem, Paul Rosenberg, 3LAU in music, Larry Fitzgerald and Shari Glazer in sports; Eric Baker, Julia and Kevin Hartz, Vinny Lingham and Tobias Lütke in tech, and many more.