We’re excited to announce the launch of Finiliar Studios and our $500k pre-seed round. Our backers are some of the best builders, artists, and investors out there.

Hello fini fam!

A new chapter is beginning. We’re launching Finiliar Studios to develop software and creative IP for the finiliar ecosystem.

With this fundraise, we plan to develop a suite of apps, integrations, and other finiliar products that extend well beyond crypto.

Recent milestones

Our original goal, which we completed, was to create an NFT collection of adorable beings whose emotions are tied to various crypto coins. We managed to produce:

• 10,000 3D models with unprecedented variety

• >11,000 unique items and accessories

• 350,000 expressive animations (and counting)

Since the launch of onchain oracle connectivity in December, we’ve built a number of platforms for finis to inhabit.

The first of these is our website, www.finiliar.com, where you can discover the collection in the highest quality and watch finiliar react to market data in real time with a bespoke UI. The website also has an aggregated marketplace for buying and selling finis.

More recently, we’ve developed an iOS and Apple Watch app for users to browse the entire collection, save their favorites as friends, and create an assortment of widgets for tracking their finis’ moods on the go.

A closed beta of the app launched this week, and we’ll continue to onboard members of our community before releasing it to the general public in the near future. Soon, everyone, not just fini holders, will be able to use finis to stay up-to-date with crypto markets and more.

finiliar started life as a conceptual artwork by Ed Fornieles in 2016, and has been exhibited around the world. Last week, we announced that finiliar will feature in the forthcoming exhibition ‘Glitches in Love: A New Formula’ at Tokyo University of the Arts. The group show will take place March 24 - April 9 and is supervised by Professor Yuko Hasegawa, Director of the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawal.

Why the raise?

Our mission is to make finiliar the most loved characters on the internet. These are our plans for the funds raised in this round:

First, we want to develop finiliar as embodied software with a wide range of capabilities. This means building upon our current website and apps, as well as exploring finis’ potential to express much more than just crypto prices.

Second, we’re focused on sending finis out into the wide world. Distribution is a major challenge for avatar projects, so we’re working on integrations that will enable your fini to live all over the web: in chat apps, on social media, in games, virtual worlds, and beyond.

Third, we recently announced our first full-time hire, Dan Miller, who joins us from Solana NFT powerhouse Holaplex, where he was CTO. Dan previously worked as Technical Lead at Cameo with our co-founder and CTO Jake. This fundraise means that we can add more incredible talent like Dan to our team.

Who invested?

Our investors include some of the best creative and business minds in the space. Many of them bought finiliar at mint and have supported us since day one. We’re extremely grateful for their confidence and backing:

IDEO CoLab Ventures • Wave Financial • 0xDEAFBEEF • Cryptopathic • Mister Todd • Russell Smith • Flashrekt • Kadin Donohoe • Bitcoin Palmer • Teo Leibowitz • Luiz Ramalho • TopTickCrypto • María Paula Fernandez • Mitchell F Chan • Ben Roy • Trent Elmore • 1ofthemanymatts • Simon Denny • Joshua Harding • Geebz • EthDapps

We’ve got so much in the works this year and can’t wait to share more with you all. We really are just getting started.