With less venture capital to go around and market conditions impacting all of crypto, the digital art collective and marketplace Wildxyz is an anomaly. Earlier this month, it announced a $7 million seed round led by private equity firm Matrix Partners that seems to fly in the face of the current crypto winter and shows that this was no ordinary VC deal. 

Hollywood celebrities, Silicon Valley folks, and sports personalities also participated in the deal. Gwyneth Paltrow, the Co-Founder of Oculus, Nate Mitchell, and President of the Philadelphia 76ers Daryl Morey, for example. 

“I’m really proud of our diversity of investors,” WIld Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Douglass Kobs recently told me. “All of them share our belief that digital and experimental art will have a massive impact on the world as we know it.”

Wild raised their pre-seed round in the first half of 2022, primarily with friends and family. Over the summer, they kicked off their seed round and partnered with a portfolio of investors who believed in Wild’s mission to disrupt the digital art space. 

It’s, you know, Wild

The multi-dimensional platform aims to solve the fragmented experiences for today’s artists to create more intimate connections between creators and collectors.  

Matrix Partners invested in Kobs’ previous company, Apartment List. “It was a natural choice given their deep experience in building successful marketplaces like eBay and PayPal, and their early investments in cutting-edge technology like Oculus and AfterPay,” Kobs said. 

Wild plans to use the funding towards building out their artist residency, as well as expand the technical infrastructure to support art in new and expansive ways. 

“People call our residency the YCombinator for web3,” added Kobs.