Pudgy Penguins Bucked the NFT Crash—Now It’s Raised $9 Million
Summary
Pudgy Penguins, an Ethereum NFT project that surged amid the 2021 bull run and then toppled into chaos, was purchased by a serial entrepreneur about a year ago and given a second liferight as the market collapsed. But the cartoon birds have persevered, and now the team has raised funding as its ambitions grow.Today, Pudgy Penguins announced that it has raised $9 million in seed funding in a round led by early-stage investment firm 1kx, with participation from Big Brain Holdings, Kronos Research, Old Fashion Research, CRIT Ventures, and the founders of LayerZero Labs, per a release.The project launched in July 2021, just as the NFT market started putting up billions of dollars worth of trading volume each month, and Pudgy Penguins rise was propelled in part by a viral story in The New York Times.But the initial buzz didnt last, and by early 2022, the community was in disarray amid controversy over a co-founders past Web3 actions and plans by some NFT holders to break away by wrapping their Penguins as another token. Pudgy prices fell sharply amid the drama.Luca Netz, a serial entrepreneur, purchased the project IP outright from the founders in April 2022 for $2.5 million, and told Decrypt that Pudgy Penguins didnt have the millions of dollars worth of funds that some NFTs projects and startups had banked during the bull run.When we bought it, we had no money in the bank, he said. The first NFT he ever bought was a Pudgy Penguin, and he told Decrypt that he then went on to trade millions of dollars worth of NFTs after that.Netz later purchased the Pudgy IP thinking that it had all the pieces to drive both a Web3 community and mainstream extensions ranging from products to entertainment media. Pudgy Penguins has notched over 3 billion views on its official GIFs and tens of millions of Instagram views, and now the seed funding and apparent WME deal may help it reach an even wider audience.I look at the Pudgy Penguin like an influencer, Netz said.