Two separate funding rounds brought in $4.5 million for Irene Zhao’s So-Col

Irene Zhao, a prominent figure in the cryptocurrency space, is credited with launching a new social platform on web3 called So-Col (Social Collectibles), which just announced receiving $4.5 million in fresh funding throughout two rounds.

According to statements (1) made by DWF on Tuesday, the web3 investment firm was the sole sponsor of the most recent round, which resulted in the raising of $1.5 million.

In addition, Zhao disclosed to The Block in a conversation that in May of last year, So-Col raised $3 million in a round that Blockchain Capital led.

The valuation for the May round was set at one hundred million dollars. Through the use of NFTs, Zhao’s So-Col intends to turbocharge the productivity of influencers.

After the startup’s seed fundraising of $1.75 million in February 2022, the DWF round brings So-total Col’s funding to date to $6.25 million.

This comes after the startup received seed funding. Investors purchased So-simp Col’s tokens during all three rounds of fundraising, which were all conducted as token rounds.

DWF Labs has been providing a substantial amount of help for token rounds. It has invested in more than 15 new businesses in the early stages of their development over the course of the past few months, some of which include Conflux, Network, Orbs, and Synthetix.

The prices of the tokens issued by the majority of these new businesses went up when the prominent market participant DWF disclosed its stakes in a number of these businesses.

The DWF investment in So-Col was initially made in February of this year. The company’s investment has a vesting period of one year, which will officially come to an end in February 2024.

When she debuted a collection called IreneDAO, Instagram model and entrepreneur Zhao illustrated how NFTs might be used to monetize a social media following.

IreneDAO is the name of Zhao’s collection. Roughly twenty-six hundred Ether, or about $6.5 million worth, these digital stickers have been sent to OpenSea.

The stickers have Zhao shown in a variety of stances and are followed by crypto catchphrases. In reference to the So-Col platform, Zhao referred to the IreneDAO project as a proof of concept.

 

So-Col’s Expansion Plans

So-Col, an Ethereum-based company, has expressed interest in expanding its support for Layer 1 and Layer 2 blockchains and going multichain following a recent investment from DWF.

So-Col is a web3 social platform that enables content creators and businesses to leverage non-fungible tokens, which are referred to as collectibles on its platform, as the basis for subscriptions and exclusive content.

According to Zhao, So-Col already has a community of 300 creators utilizing the network. Zhao also stated that the plan is to onboard additional producers by enticing them with simp tokens and cash payouts. So-Col currently has a community of 300 creators utilizing the platform.

So-Col was established by Zhao and co-founder Benjamin Tang, and it successfully closed its seed round of $1.75 million, with Animoca Brands and DeFiance Capital serving as the lead sponsors.

The company is working with Stripe to make it easier for customers to make payments, and it is collaborating with StarkEx, a scaling platform for Ethereum, to reduce the fees that content creators must pay.

In January, KuCoin became the first exchange to list So-simp Col’s token. Going forward, the company intends to publish the token on a number of additional exchanges, including Binance, OKX, ByBit, and Bitget.