Announcing DeForm’s $4.6M Seed Round

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DeForm raises $4.6M from Kindred Ventures to build a crypto-native CRM that makes marketing effective using onchain data and activity.

tl;dr

Crypto, blockchain, and NFTs are shifting company digital marketing strategies from being purely online to also onchain. Onchain marketing allows for a more effective engagement tracking system, a way to incentive-align early and loyal fans, and accelerated capital formation to fund new initiatives. With megabrands like Nike, Gucci, McDonalds, and Starbucks all venturing into the space, this presents a $200 billion inevitable opportunity that will forever redefine how we connect with brands through the internet.

There are serious challenges with the current state of onchain marketing technology. Onchain marketing initiatives require marketers to collect information like product feedback, mailing addresses, preferences, and social media accounts while validating certain token ownership or wallet activity. However, marrying online, onchain, and physical data requires significant engineering and data processing work.

To make marketing effective using onchain data and activity, DeForm is building out a crypto-native CRM that allows creators, developers, and brands to learn from their customers and communities while managing these relationships with purpose-built software tools. Some examples include: making online token-gated surveys, analyzing onchain activity in your community, administering crypto rewards like NFTs, and organizing and communicating with your customer community.

We’re beyond excited to announce our $4.6M seed round led by Kindred Ventures to grow our San Francisco-based team to empower marketers to integrate onchain marketing capabilities to their existing tool stack. If you’re interested, check out our careers page! If you’re a marketing or community leader running into challenges with identifying, engaging, and rewarding your community, book a demo here.

Digital marketing is expanding from online to onchain

Blockchains enable organizations to run community and marketing campaigns on top of a shared identity system. Sharing data sources simplifies collaboration between different people across multiple companies.

Let’s look at an example.

Say Company A wants to co-market with Company B and give customers of Company B a discount. How would that work?

In the old world, A needs to collaborate with B on creative, distribution, customer lists, etc. and this might take years and not actually successfully launch

In the blockchain world, consumers own their own data and representations of membership — they can take these badges to company A directly and apply for a discount. Company A can launch the program whenever they want

This is because in the blockchain world, data is open and shareable by default rather than living in permissioned siloes

To put the benefits of this paradigm shift into concrete terms:

In 2022, Tiffany and Co. sold 250 custom jewel-encrusted pendants to CryptoPunks NFT holders totaling $12.5M.

In August 2023, Base launched Onchain Summer with over 50 artists, brands, and companies to release NFTs. NFT holders were then rewarded many perks, including Coinbase product discount codes (this is powered by DeForm!).

Personally, I look forward to the day Nike and Pudgy Penguin partner together to create themed shoes and offer exclusive purchasing opportunities to penguin owners (disclaimer: yes, I am a holder).

To put some numbers into perspective, the entire collectibles market is estimated to reach $454 billion by 2033, growing at a CAGR of 26.7% (source). The NFT market is expected to reach $211.72 Billion by 2030 (source). Nike reportedly earned $185M in NFT sales revenue with many major brands also venturing into various fun ways to turn creative marketing moments into forever digital memories.

Onchain marketing is here.

At DeForm, we believe that marketers will become drivers of mainstream crypto adoption. In recent years, blockchain data has been primarily embraced by developers and traders. The inevitable opportunity lies within innovative marketers who are looking for a less fragmented engagement tracking system, a way to incentive-align early and loyal fans, and accelerated capital formation to fund new initiatives.

Current Challenges with Onchain Marketing

As successful as the Tiffany and Co. CryptoPunks pendants drop was, there are serious challenges with the current state of onchain marketing technology.

Onchain marketing initiatives often require marketers to collect essential information from their community such as product feedback, mailing addresses, preferences, and social media accounts while validating token ownership or wallet activity.

Unfortunately, this is no easy task. Marrying online, onchain, and physical information about your customers requires significant engineering and data processing work.

For example, if you want to deliver a gift to holders of a CryptoPunk NFT today, you need to send out a form to collect shipping details and wallet addresses. But how do you verify that the form responder actually owns a CryptoPunk NFT? You need to work with a developer or data engineer to query the blockchain and validate this information. On top of that, airdrop farmers and bot scripters love to swarm on crypto-related forms, so you will need to write spreadsheet formulas to clean up any spam submissions.

This resource-intensive process can take many hours and even weeks to see through, restricting the speed and scale of innovative marketing initiatives like:

New product launches that involve airdrop tokens to wallets based on a list of eligible emails

Giving out discount codes to people that own a certain set of NFTs

Deciding who can get rewarded an NFT based on some other onchain activity

It really shouldn’t be this hard, and that’s why we’re here.

DeForm: crypto-native CRM that enables marketing for the new internet era.

At DeForm, we’re at the forefront of seeing how operators are leaning into marketing and community engagement enabled by blockchain and crypto.

Some initiatives that are near and dear to my heart -

🔵 Base x DeForm

As part of the launch of Base network, which bridged over $170M in just days after going live, DeForm provided a way for the new L2 to kickstart developer activity. The Base team used DeForm to verify contract deployment activity on the Base network and collect application information. This enabled the Base core team to gift NFTs to developers who made early and meaningful contributions to their new blockchain ecosystem.

🍈 MeTown x DeForm

In Hokkaido, Japan lies a farm town named Yubari, famous for its luxury melons that are known to be the 4th most expensive fruit in the world. MeTown used NFTs to fundraise $28,000 in capital and launch a digital ambassador program that not only grants membership passes into an online community, but also gets you access to curated farming experiences and guaranteed shipment of melons once in season. With DeForm, MeTown was able to create token-gated forms and surveys that collected shipping addresses and community feedback from verified NFT holders.

❄️ Pudgy Penguins x DeForm

Pudgy Penguins, an NFT community that’s had more than 184,919 ETH in trading volume, used the token-gating functionality of DeForm to exclusively ask Pudgy holders for their event interest and availabilities for their very first SF meetup. The form also asked for people’s +1 info and verified wallet addresses so that attendance NFTs could be sent to participants afterwards.

These examples illustrate ways in which marketing and community operations greatly leverage the use of wallets and blockchain as the primary identity system for audience management and engagement. Through DeForm, our customers were able to complete their projects with mere clicks and zero scripts.

And this is only the beginning.

The Road Ahead — We’re Hiring 🎉

We are so excited to announce our $4.6M seed funding round led by Kindred Ventures with strong participation from renowned investors including Elad Gil of unicorn fame, Scalar Capital, A.Capital, and numerous incredible angels who are embracing the intersection of blockchain, brand engagement, community, and identity.

We have so much more ahead of us as we build out an extensive crypto-native CRM:

Onchain workflows and integrations

Easily run blockchain queries & AI-powered data processing in accordance to customer records

Distribution of digital collectibles and tokens

We’re proud to be working alongside industry-leading players like Coinbase, Alchemy, ENS, and Optimism to create seamless crypto-enabled marketing and community experiences.

The funding will be used to grow our San Francisco-based team to empower marketers to integrate onchain marketing capabilities to their existing tool stack. Both Kei and I come from established tech companies that focus on building software that enable people to work more effectively, and we’re excited to keep doing this. Except this time it’s about helping people effortlessly work onchain, not just online.

If you’re a marketing or community leader running into challenges with identifying, engaging, and rewarding your community, book a demo here!

We’re also hiring! If you’re interested in joining our team, check out our careers page.

DeForm is a product by Contribution Labs Inc., a San Francisco based company. For further inquiries, please email hello@deform.cc.