NFT studio Mojito completes $20M seed round with help from Sotheby's

NFT development studio Mojito announced Friday that they have raised $20M in seed funding from a number of investors including internationally known auction house Sotheby's.

According to an announcement published in Forbes, Sotheby’s auction house, in partnership with Future Perfect Ventures, Creative Artists Agency and NEA’s Connect Ventures, contributed to the round at Mojito’s estimated value of $100 Million.

The Delaware-based start-up indicated that it will use this new injection of capital to grow and develop its engineering teams, make a better version of its current NFT platform and further develop its NFT trading and investment platforms.

The NFT market has seen its total monthly sales drop from early September, though numbers have held at between $1.8 and $2.1 billion for the last month, according to nonfungible.com. The NFT market’s total monthly sales hit an all-time high of $3.7 billion on Sept. 4 after a steady rise in late July. $31 million of the current total NFT market sales comes from the sale of art-based assets.

Digital art marketplaces such as OpenSea achieved prominence during this time as well, reportedly hosting 98 percent of the market’s transactions through August 2021.

Art dealers and museums have taken notice, and are beginning to follow suit as they chase the money that is apparent in this new market. Both Sotheby’s and Christie’s auction houses have had a number of successful NFT auctions in the past year. Christie’s was the first of the two to host a global auction of an NFT.

Mojito previously aided Sotheby’s in the development of its new digital NFT marketplace, known as Metaverse.

Businessman and TV personality Kevin O’Leary, a one-time vocal opponent to cryptocurrency-based investments, recently stated his belief that the NFT market would become bigger than Bitcoin during an interview on the Pomp podcast.