Pinata Raises $21.5M to Enhance NFT Media Infrastructure

In the past year, Pinata’s revenue growth has increased 42 times year over year, Tut said. Since January, its user base increased about 131% from 104,000 users to over 240,000 users as of today, Tut shared. Companies like OpenSea, DraftKings, Protocol Labs and Yuga Labs also use the platform.

“As you fast-forward into today, we’ve seen that ultimately NFTs act as if they’re their own applications. They want to serve content to millions of people like YouTube or TikTok does, but a lot of these applications don’t have the ability to do so yet", Tut said.

The platform provides infrastructure for both emerging creators and enterprises to store, manage and build more functionality into their NFTs, Mike Duboe, partner at Greylock, said in a statement shared with TechCrunch.

“While today's NFT activity might focus around static jpeg files, we believe this is just the tip of the iceberg for this technology and that the most interesting applications around NFTs involve richer media with deeper functionality", Duboe explained.

Ultimately, Pinata aims to serve content at scale for NFT projects that want to focus on building out media and content. The fresh capital will be used to grow the team and improve its infrastructure so it is faster, more stable and able to “power the next generation of NFTs", Tut mentioned.

“To us, the future looks like full-blown applications, not just simple images or complex applications associated with NFTs. NFTs are going to be so much more than people understand today", he added.