Javaughn Lawrence was looking for a product and found inspiration from some PokE9;mon cards.
He joined a Facebook group for PokE9;mon collectors and started watching people rip open packs of cards and sell them.
The video was slow, the chat was slow, and you had to pay using five different payment methods. People were still coming on to buy, and they were engaged, kind and involved with it.
Lawrence got a pack of cards for himself, but also the idea of building something better. He and Sameep Sheth began hacking together.
Javaughn Lawrence is the CEO of Drip. The image is called Drip.
Lawrence thinks that theshopify is the best for livestream commerce because it provides tooling so users can run auctions, drops or buy it now.
In China, live commerce sales are expected to hit $423 billion in 2022. The U.S. live commerce market is poised to reach $35 billion in sales by 2024.
The landscape is dominated by Whatnot and Popshop. The company is developing features to allow users to integrate the livestream into their web properties so they can capture the majority of their audience and for third-party developers to build experiences on top of our platform.
Cash or cryptocurrencies can be collected for physical products and soon NFTs. Lawrence said that they may create a subscription product down the line, with Drip taking a 6% cut of transactions for now.
The company initially brought in several hundred thousand dollars in seed funding, but began growing over 20 times in monthly volume and grew to a team of 19. Lawrence and Sheth decided to go after more funding. They raised another $28.6 million in a combined seed and Series A round that included $23 million in Series A dollars.
A group of angel investors, including Jeff Zirlin, a founder of Axie Infinity, and Nick Tomaino, a general partner of 1confirmation, participated in the rounds.
With this new round of funding, Drip will scale its NFT selling efforts, including on-chain transactions on Ethereum and seller acquisitions, as well as decentralizing access to its live selling capabilities and growing the team, especially in engineering, product, partnerships and operations.
Some users are actually taking screen recordings of the NFT reveal or having a friend on a video chat with them. That is what the company wants to change.
Lawrence said that the NFT purchasing experience is a very social experience. Being a part of a community is the core interaction and video will help to engage the community afterwards as well.
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