New York-based Mediachain has become the latest blockchain startup to join the portfolios of VC heavyweights Andreessen Horowitz and Union Square Ventures. The two firms announced today that they led a $1.5m seed round for the digital media startup. RRE Ventures, Digital Currency Group and LDV Capital also participated in the round, as did angel investors Alexis Ohanian, William Mougayar, Kanyi Maqubela, David Lee, Mathieu Drouin and Brian Message.
The funding comes four months after the launch of Mediachain’s core product , a metadata protocol that envisions content creators timestamping their work to the bitcoin blockchain while also storing it with the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS).
In interview, Mediachain Labs co-founders Jesse Walden and Denis Nazarov expressed their enthusiasm for joining the portfolios of VCs that have backed some of the ecosystem’s boldest bets, including Internet of Things startup 21 Inc and Coinbase , a bitcoin brokerage turned digital asset exchange .
Still, Mediachain’s founders see this as "positive pressure" that will encourage their work on open data management.
Walden told CoinDesk: "There’s a lot of collaboration across the community. We’re all helping each other, so joining this portfolio among these other name-brand projects is a boon for us and an incentive to learn more." The investment is also indicative of an emerging strategy that finds Andreessen Horowitz and Union Square Venture showing a preference for backing developer teams working on open-source blockchain technologies that seek to apply bitcoin’s design principles to new business problems.
In June of last year, for example, the firms both backed OB1 , the team behind the decentralized e-commerce platform OpenBazaar.
While surprising given OpenBazaar’s connotations with the defunct dark market Silk Road , the move has nonetheless proven to be a savvy one. OpenBazaar has gained significant traction since its April launch, having been downloaded more than 100,000 times […]
