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Spaceport has raised $3.6 million for its Web3 licensing protocol that allows seamless monetization of intellectual property.
The investors in the pre-seed funding round included Arca, Decasonic and CRIT Ventures, the venture capital arm of publicly-traded game developer Com2uS.
Other participants included Cozomo De Medici, Diaspora Ventures, Infinity Ventures Crypto, FBG Capital, Nextview Ventures, Republic Asia and Valhalla Ventures.
“We built Spaceport to give creators and brands the ability to monetize their IP faster and more easily than ever before,” said Le Zhang, CEO of Spaceport, in a statement. “We’re thrilled to have the support of such an incredible lineup of investors and partners and look forward to working together to expand the licensing market and open the door to a new programmatic approach to monetizing IP.”
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Founded by serial tech entrepreneurs Le Zhang and Lida Tang, Los Angeles-based Spaceport was built to help creators, brands and agencies monetize their IP with greater velocity and to provide exposure to the metaverse vertical. The team combines traditional licensing know-how with seasoned Web3 expertise to grow the existing $300 billion licensing market into a multi-trillion dollar market.
“Spaceport unblocks a key challenge for creators to adopt Web3 by aligning value creation with their IP. Their licensing infrastructure is accessible, easy to use and drives accretive revenues,” said Paul Hsu, CEO of Decasonic, in a statement. “I see large potential today for smart contracts to improve the licensing process and contracts.”
Licensing has traditionally been a pen-and-paper industry where deals can take months to transact. Smaller creators are also locked out of the market due to the overhead involved. Spaceport’s protocol and first application, Spaceport Core, solves these inefficiencies by providing a streamlined, one-stop-shop approach to monetizing IP for creators, brands and agencies, the company said.
“Com2uS is fully committed to supporting the future of Web3 and its evolution into the mainstream,” said Kyu Lee, CEO of Com2uS USA and a partner at CRIT Ventures. “The licensing infrastructure that Spaceport is building will be fundamental to bringing the world’s favorite brands and games onto the blockchain.” Com2uS is the owner and creator of Summoners War, a multi-billion dollar gaming franchise, as well as the producers of titles including MLB 9 Innings, Ace Fishing: Wild Catch, and NBA Now.
Spaceport has already granted private access to its products through partnerships with media, gaming, and consumer goods companies that want faster, more streamlined licensing deals along with metaverse exposure. The team plans to use the funds raised to hire exceptional talent, supercharge partnerships with notable IP holders and build to a public launch of their products.
Lida Tang previously helped launch two billion-dollar gaming franchises — BioShock for Take-Two Interactive and Saints Row for Deep Silver — before starting his mobile app tooling company and cofounding an indie gaming studio.
A huge part of Spaceport’s offering will be to help brands (including gaming brands) to license their IP in the metaverse. The company started in January and it has nine employees.
As for the inspiration, Zhang said, “My cofounder Lida and I have been chatting about the metaverse and creator economy since COVID started. We had a conviction this was the final leg of digital transformation and wanted to help accelerate it.”
He said they discovered that “content creation as the largest gap —and licensing was holding things back. Realized it was a much bigger problem and set out to solve” it.
The tech leverages blockchain smart contracts to build a decentralized, accessible universal licensing catalog.
“Think of it as a ‘sexy’ MLS portal (home listing portal) but for intellectual property. Associated apps bridge the gap and provide streamlined UI/UX for real-world creators, brands and agencies that aren’t Web3 native,” Zhang said.
What’s the significance?
“Licensing is a multi-step manual process involving lawyers, accountants and many other vendors,” Zhang said. “The process is very slow and creators and brands ultimately have to trust that they will get paid their royalties Web3 tech is faster, easier, more accessible, meaning more creators and brands can play —
helping to grow the existing $300 billion market into a multi-trillion dollar market.”
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