NEAR Foundation Funding Team Report: September 2022
NEAR FOUNDATION
November 18, 2022
Welcome to the NEAR Foundation Funding Team Report that captures and highlights data for the month of September 2022. The purpose of this document is to provide transparency regarding what happened during the last month in our Funding Team, and is to be shared publicly to the ecosystem and our investor network.

Summary 

1. Grant data

1.2. Approved Grant program data

1.2. Grant highlights

1.3 Completed Projects & Milestone data

1.4 Effectiveness of the funding program

2. External funding in the NEAR Ecosystem

3. Ecosystem highlights

1. Grant data
1.1. Approved Grant Program data
Data reflects projects that have applied for a Grant via the Grants Program and that have been signed by the NEAR Foundation during the month of September (01.09.2022 to 30.09.2022).

 *Note: all applications have been processed.

General Grant data

Applications received*   📥	Grant Agreements  signed  ✅	Conversion rate	Average Grant amount 	Committed amount in dollars 💵
139	25	17%	$78 K	$1.9  M
Grant tracks**

Activation (up to $10 K)	5
Small Builder (up to $25 K)	4
Builder (up to $50 K)	11
Advanced Builder (up to $100 K)	4
Partner ($ ∞)	2
** Please note that our current grant tracks have been updated. For more information please have a look at our updated grant tracks.

Grants per category 

Gaming / Metaverse – 7

Infrastructure / Wallets – 6

NFTs – 4

Other – 4

Social Impact – 2

Institutional / Financial – 2

Grants per country (Top 5)

United States – 8

United Kingdom – 2

Switzerland – 2

Malaysia – 2

Ukraine – 1

1.2. Grant highlights 
This section provides highlights of grants that have been signed during the month.

Gaming / Metaverse projects 

Name	Website	Grant track	Location 
Arcnes	website	Advanced Builder	Poland
Bonuz	website	Advanced Builder	Dubai
Arhead	website	Builder	United Arab Emirates
Bearverse	website	Builder	United States
Gameplace by ZomboDucks	website	Builder	Israel
Joystick	website	Small Builder	Nigeria
Open character creator	website	Activation	United States
Infrastructure / Wallets projects 

Name	Website	Grant track	Location 
OnMachina	website	Partner	United States
Meteor Wallet	website	Builder	Malaysia
Verisoul	website	Builder	United States
near.js – 	/	Small Builder	Ukraine
Java-SDK part 3	website	Small Builder	Switzerland
Tonana Bridge & Connectors	website	Activation	Czech Republic
Institutional / Financial projects 

Name	Website	Grant track	Location 
Defolio	/	Partner	United Kingdom
Near Access	/	Activation	United States
Social Impact projects 

Name	Website	Grant track	Location 
BeeTogether	website	Builder	Switzerland 
GRVTY	website	Builder	United Kingdom
NFT’s projects 

Name	Website	Grant track	Location 
NEAR NFT DAO	website	Builder	United States
Naksh	website	Small Builder	India
3six9 NFT Marketplace	website	Activation	Malaysia
Solar Dex	website	Activation	United States
Other projects 

Name	Website	Grant track	Location 
Three0	website	Builder	United States
NextHollywood	website	Builder	United States
Crowdclass	website	Builder	Portugal
Alpha Leaks	/ 	Activation	Australia
1.3 Completed Projects & Milestone data 
Grant agreements are structured with milestones. Depending on the selected grant track, a grant can have from 1 to 5 milestones. For more information the funding team invites you to explore our milestone guide. 

Projects having completed a milestone  ☑️	61
Projects having completed final milestone ✅	13
Projects completed per category 

Gaming / Metaverse – 1

Infrastructure / Wallets – 5

NFTs – 1

DAOs – 3

Other – 3

Gaming / Metaverse

Alien Esports Industry	website 	Builder	United States
Alien Esports Industry is a  platform to hold esports tournaments with integrated game mechanics that provide unique opportunities to gamers.
Infrastructure / Wallets 

Kuutamo	website	Advanced Builder	Denmark
Kuutamo is building out an enterprise-grade staking node management and reporting system dedicated to support NEAR and NEAR-affiliated networks. Kuutamo will provide practical tooling to enable individuals and organizations to operate secure, honest, and profitable validators in a straightforward way. 
Blockperks	website	Advanced Builder	United Kingdom
Blockperks is building a complete Web3 infrastructure and NFT marketplace for brands, artists, and creators to successfully bridge from Web2 to Web3 with NEAR. Blockperks provides the platform architecture and an adaptive social media dApp so that organizations, clients, and end-users can easily onboard and tokenize assets through the creating and trading of NFT’s. 
Solace Protocol	website	Activation	India
Solace is a program (smart-contract) based non-custodial wallet for NEAR which eases user’s onboarding and enhances security using social recovery, written in Rust.
Emblem Vault	website	Builder	United States
Emblem Vault is an application that collects the value of a portfolio within a token, you can also add non-blockchain assets to the portfolio.
Java SDK – Part 3	website	Small Builder	Switzerland
From the team who delivered the Java-API part 1/2 and that took over the Borshj for maintenance. This time they would like to further enhance the Java API and implement services to create accounts, manage additional reward structure, and call other smart contracts methods.
NFTs

NFT Marketplace for Science IPs	website 	Advanced Builder	United States
NFT Marketplace for Science IPs is building a NFT marketplace for science IPs on top of our data & AI ecosystem platform, for which the project  innovates with smart contracts for best services to scientists worldwide.
DAOs

Deep Skills	website 	Builder	British Virgin Islands
Deep Skills aims to diverse options of how current organizations recruit, educate, and coordinate talented individuals.
Gyde	website 	Builder	United States
Gyde connects users with helping services that they are looking for. The DAO provides incentives via a token to allocate to reviewers on the platform. The DAO also acts as a data provider selling to governments and think tanks driving incentives for power users.
NEAR Alexandria	github 	Builder	Brazil
NEAR Alexandria Is building the largest virtual library for NEAR content and academic content. The team will use metabuilders, meta designers, NEAR DAO council members and academics to build the virtual building, the objects, and the links from all the real books, papers, articles and texts in general that will be in the library.
Other

Vital Point AI	website 	Builder	Canada
Vital Point AI is focused on open-source blockchain development using NEAR Protocol. With a proven record of delivering quality tutorials and dedication to the NEAR ecosystem, helping scale Vital Point Academy will benefit NEAR and the ecosystem in various ways.
Aerx	website 	Builder	Russia
A decentralized modular social network where any user can own their content according to the create2eart principle.
NEAR NYC	website 	Builder	United States
NEAR NYC is a dedicated NEAR community in NYC that will scale NEAR awareness and education by organizing bi-weekly meetups, managing localized social media accounts (Twitter, Telegram, Instagram, Meetup, Eventbrite), establish partnerships with community leaders, and organizing a NEAR NYC hacker house.
1.4 Effectiveness of the funding program  
Total external funding (overall amount) came from projects that have received a grant (around 44%).

2. External funding in the NEAR Ecosystem
This section provides information about external funding in the NEAR ecosystem

12 closed projects in Q3 ‘22 – ($92.2M)
4 finalizing rounds
18 new fundraising processes kicked off 
38 VC intros made
Closed Rounds (September data)
Sender Wallet – Raised a $4.5M private round led by Pantera Capital with participation from Crypto.com, Jump, Amber Group, Woo Network, SevenX Ventures, Shima Capital, and others.
Hillridge – Raised a $2.3M seed round to address climate protection in the agriculture industry with their Insurtech solution building on NEAR.
Closed Rounds (Q3 data)
Portalverse Network – raised a multi-million $ seed round with participation from Big Brain Holdings, 2Moon Capital, and Cogitent Ventures to bring the first decentralized cloud gaming and rendering network to the NEAR ecosystem.
Scorefam – secured a capital commitment of up to $25M from GEM Digital to expand their gaming NFT suite of products.
Token Terminal – raised $6.5M to expand their crypto asset data coverage, which will soon include NEAR Protocol and NEAR ecosystem projects.
Mystiko.Network – raised a $10M round this past month. Mystiko received a grant from NEAR Foundation to support NEAR through their transaction privacy layer.
Sweat Economy – raised $13M in funding including a private token sale, to accelerate their move into Web3.
Niche – closed a $1.8M pre-seed to bring decentralized social media to NEAR.
Aurigami – raised $12M in token rounds earlier this year to continue to grow DeFi on Aurora.
Play Ember – just closed a $1.4M token seed round to bring mobile gaming to NEAR. The team is currently exploring an equity round at this moment as well. 
3. Ecosystem highlights  
NEARWEEK is the one-stop-shop for all NEAR related news. Each weekly newsletter and edition is made possible via news contributions from the NEARWEEK community to the NEWS DAO. Subscribe or visit NEARWEEK.com to get your weekly dose of news from the NEARverse!

For the month of September we invite you to read through the following newsletters : 

Newsletter 74 

Newsletter 75 

Newsletter 76

Newsletter 77 

If you are interested in getting funded : 

explore the NEAR Funding  linktree
visit NF’s website : https://pages.near.org/
contact NF Grants : [email protected]