Candy

The company was launched by Michael Rubin, the CEO of sports retailer Fanatics (a company valued at over $30 billion), along with Galaxy Digital CEO Mike Novogratz and famous entrepreneur and internet personality Gary Vaynerchuk who was an angel investor in the likes of Slack, Venmo, and Uber.

While competition amongst NFT marketplaces is tight, Candy stands out from the crowd given its high profile founding team, business partnerships with the likes of Major League Basketball, Netflix and Getty Images, as well as its rapidly-earned $1.5 billion valuation. There’s been plenty of encouragement with sales too, particularly since the platform debuted its trading marketplace in early 2022. Remarkably, it took just eight hours to surpass $1 million in trade volume.

Following the collapse in the crypto and NFT space in late 2022 it would be expected that Candy might have fared badly, but it has instead announced an extension to its Series A funding round which has attracted significant investment. It intends to use this money to scale the platform and seek out new partnership opportunities with major brands.