NEAR Foundation Funding Team Report: September 2022

November 18, 2022

Welcome to the NEAR Foundation Funding Team Report that captures and highlights data for the month of September 2022. The purpose of this document is to provide transparency regarding what happened during the last month in our Funding Team, and is to be shared publicly to the ecosystem and our investor network.

Summary

1. Grant data

1.2. Approved Grant program data

1.2. Grant highlights

1.3 Completed Projects & Milestone data

1.4 Effectiveness of the funding program

2. External funding in the NEAR Ecosystem

3. Ecosystem highlights

1. Grant data

1.1. Approved Grant Program data

Data reflects projects that have applied for a Grant via the Grants Program and that have been signed by the NEAR Foundation during the month of September (01.09.2022 to 30.09.2022).

*Note: all applications have been processed.

General Grant data

Applications received* 📥Grant Agreements signed ✅Conversion rateAverage Grant amount Committed amount in dollars 💵1392517%$78 K$1.9 M

Grant tracks**

Activation (up to $10 K)5Small Builder (up to $25 K)4Builder (up to $50 K)11Advanced Builder (up to $100 K)4Partner ($ ∞)2

** Please note that our current grant tracks have been updated. For more information please have a look at our updated grant tracks.

Grants per category

Gaming / Metaverse - 7

Infrastructure / Wallets - 6

NFTs - 4

Other - 4

Social Impact - 2

Institutional / Financial - 2

Grants per country (Top 5)

United States - 8

United Kingdom - 2

Switzerland - 2

Malaysia - 2

Ukraine - 1

1.2. Grant highlights

This section provides highlights of grants that have been signed during the month.

Gaming / Metaverse projects

NameWebsiteGrant trackLocation ArcneswebsiteAdvanced BuilderPolandBonuzwebsiteAdvanced BuilderDubaiArheadwebsiteBuilderUnited Arab EmiratesBearversewebsiteBuilderUnited StatesGameplace by ZomboDuckswebsiteBuilderIsraelJoystickwebsiteSmall BuilderNigeriaOpen character creatorwebsiteActivationUnited States

Infrastructure / Wallets projects

NameWebsiteGrant trackLocation OnMachinawebsitePartnerUnited StatesMeteor WalletwebsiteBuilderMalaysiaVerisoulwebsiteBuilderUnited Statesnear.js - /Small BuilderUkraineJava-SDK part 3websiteSmall BuilderSwitzerlandTonana Bridge & ConnectorswebsiteActivationCzech Republic

Institutional / Financial projects

NameWebsiteGrant trackLocation Defolio/PartnerUnited KingdomNear Access/ActivationUnited States

Social Impact projects

NameWebsiteGrant trackLocation BeeTogetherwebsiteBuilderSwitzerland GRVTYwebsiteBuilderUnited Kingdom

NFT’s projects

NameWebsiteGrant trackLocation NEAR NFT DAOwebsiteBuilderUnited StatesNakshwebsiteSmall BuilderIndia3six9 NFT MarketplacewebsiteActivationMalaysiaSolar DexwebsiteActivationUnited States

Other projects

NameWebsiteGrant trackLocation Three0websiteBuilderUnited StatesNextHollywoodwebsiteBuilderUnited StatesCrowdclasswebsiteBuilderPortugalAlpha Leaks/ ActivationAustralia

1.3 Completed Projects & Milestone data

Grant agreements are structured with milestones. Depending on the selected grant track, a grant can have from 1 to 5 milestones. For more information the funding team invites you to explore our milestone guide.

Projects having completed a milestone ☑️61Projects having completed final milestone ✅13

Projects completed per category

Gaming / Metaverse - 1

Infrastructure / Wallets - 5

NFTs - 1

DAOs - 3

Other - 3

Gaming / Metaverse

Alien Esports Industrywebsite BuilderUnited States Alien Esports Industry is a platform to hold esports tournaments with integrated game mechanics that provide unique opportunities to gamers.

Infrastructure / Wallets

KuutamowebsiteAdvanced BuilderDenmark Kuutamo is building out an enterprise-grade staking node management and reporting system dedicated to support NEAR and NEAR-affiliated networks. Kuutamo will provide practical tooling to enable individuals and organizations to operate secure, honest, and profitable validators in a straightforward way. BlockperkswebsiteAdvanced BuilderUnited Kingdom Blockperks is building a complete Web3 infrastructure and NFT marketplace for brands, artists, and creators to successfully bridge from Web2 to Web3 with NEAR. Blockperks provides the platform architecture and an adaptive social media dApp so that organizations, clients, and end-users can easily onboard and tokenize assets through the creating and trading of NFT’s. Solace ProtocolwebsiteActivationIndia Solace is a program (smart-contract) based non-custodial wallet for NEAR which eases user's onboarding and enhances security using social recovery, written in Rust. Emblem VaultwebsiteBuilderUnited States Emblem Vault is an application that collects the value of a portfolio within a token, you can also add non-blockchain assets to the portfolio. Java SDK - Part 3websiteSmall BuilderSwitzerland From the team who delivered the Java-API part 1/2 and that took over the Borshj for maintenance. This time they would like to further enhance the Java API and implement services to create accounts, manage additional reward structure, and call other smart contracts methods.

NFTs

NFT Marketplace for Science IPswebsite Advanced BuilderUnited States NFT Marketplace for Science IPs is building a NFT marketplace for science IPs on top of our data & AI ecosystem platform, for which the project innovates with smart contracts for best services to scientists worldwide.

DAOs

Deep Skillswebsite BuilderBritish Virgin Islands Deep Skills aims to diverse options of how current organizations recruit, educate, and coordinate talented individuals. Gydewebsite BuilderUnited States Gyde connects users with helping services that they are looking for. The DAO provides incentives via a token to allocate to reviewers on the platform. The DAO also acts as a data provider selling to governments and think tanks driving incentives for power users. NEAR Alexandriagithub BuilderBrazil NEAR Alexandria Is building the largest virtual library for NEAR content and academic content. The team will use metabuilders, meta designers, NEAR DAO council members and academics to build the virtual building, the objects, and the links from all the real books, papers, articles and texts in general that will be in the library.

Other

Vital Point AIwebsite BuilderCanada Vital Point AI is focused on open-source blockchain development using NEAR Protocol. With a proven record of delivering quality tutorials and dedication to the NEAR ecosystem, helping scale Vital Point Academy will benefit NEAR and the ecosystem in various ways. Aerxwebsite BuilderRussia A decentralized modular social network where any user can own their content according to the create2eart principle. NEAR NYCwebsite BuilderUnited States NEAR NYC is a dedicated NEAR community in NYC that will scale NEAR awareness and education by organizing bi-weekly meetups, managing localized social media accounts (Twitter, Telegram, Instagram, Meetup, Eventbrite), establish partnerships with community leaders, and organizing a NEAR NYC hacker house.

1.4 Effectiveness of the funding program

Total external funding (overall amount) came from projects that have received a grant (around 44%).

2. External funding in the NEAR Ecosystem

This section provides information about external funding in the NEAR ecosystem

12 closed projects in Q3 ‘22 - ($92.2M)
4 finalizing rounds
18 new fundraising processes kicked off
38 VC intros made
Closed Rounds (September data)
- Sender Wallet - Raised a $4.5M private round led by Pantera Capital with participation from Crypto.com, Jump, Amber Group, Woo Network, SevenX Ventures, Shima Capital, and others.
- Hillridge - Raised a $2.3M seed round to address climate protection in the agriculture industry with their Insurtech solution building on NEAR.

Closed Rounds (Q3 data)
- Portalverse Network - raised a multi-million $ seed round with participation from Big Brain Holdings, 2Moon Capital, and Cogitent Ventures to bring the first decentralized cloud gaming and rendering network to the NEAR ecosystem.
- Scorefam - secured a capital commitment of up to $25M from GEM Digital to expand their gaming NFT suite of products.
- Token Terminal - raised $6.5M to expand their crypto asset data coverage, which will soon include NEAR Protocol and NEAR ecosystem projects.
- Mystiko.Network - raised a $10M round this past month. Mystiko received a grant from NEAR Foundation to support NEAR through their transaction privacy layer.
- Sweat Economy - raised $13M in funding including a private token sale, to accelerate their move into Web3.
- Niche - closed a $1.8M pre-seed to bring decentralized social media to NEAR.
- Aurigami - raised $12M in token rounds earlier this year to continue to grow DeFi on Aurora.
- Play Ember - just closed a $1.4M token seed round to bring mobile gaming to NEAR. The team is currently exploring an equity round at this moment as well.

3. Ecosystem highlights

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For the month of September we invite you to read through the following newsletters :

If you are interested in getting funded :