Meme.com Raises $5 Million to Launch First Meme Market Platform

• Social media platform-cum-meme marketplace raises $5 million to fund further expansion.
• Following the success of meme coins like Dogecoin and the explosion of NFT popularity, Meme.com aims to introduce more people to meme coin and NFT trading.

Following its successful completion of the Outlier Ventures acceleration program, Meme.com has announced a successful $5 million funding round led by Outlier Ventures, Digital Finance Group, Morningstar, Blockhype and Spark Digital Capital.

Congratulations to the https://t.co/e9F8gCnPCH team! 💫

Love the new website btw (and domain of course) 🙂 https://t.co/4WqiZtR4nL pic.twitter.com/vFffEQ0pzq

— Morningstar Ventures (@Morningstar_vc) May 27, 2021

In an announcement on May 27, the company revealed that the funding is intended to boost its expansion plans as it seeks to bring meme coin investment and NFT trading into the mainstream online space. In addition to the aforementioned blockchain-focused VC firms, the funding round also included angel investment from Altitude Games CEO Gabby Dizon, and Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal.

What Meme.com Hopes to Achieve

Billing itself as “what would happen if Doge and Wikipedia had a baby,” Meme.com aims to tokenise the experience of interacting with internet trends and memes in a way that potentially redefines the entire concept of online value as it currently exists. At its core is a function that mints memetic tokens (meme coins) whose value is entirely derived from ongoing trends or popular memes.

Using a reward system and a full-function marketplace, the actual monetary value of each meme can be monitored and compared against others using token charts and data. Combining the functions of a social media platform and a token marketplace, Meme.com hopes to tap into the burgeoning popularity of existing meme coins like Dogecoin, as well as the NFT boom to fundamentally reshape what it means to create value on the internet.

Explaining this vision further, Johan Unger, Ancient Alien at Meme.com said:

The vision of a platform that uses crypto to measure the value of things on the Internet has been with us for a long time. Those who’ve been following our community know that memes are at the core of our DNA. We are now doubling down on this with Meme.com. 

No Laughing Matter

While the concept of monetizing memes might seem somewhat left field, Mattias Tyrberg, Sir Stonks at Meme.com is keen to point out that this is no flight of fancy. According to him, the team has the requisite experience to make this a reality. In his words:

The Meme.com team has a passion and several years of experience with viral and memetic content, which is an integral part of the internet. We believe that humor and memes have the power to connect people and create unique shared experiences.

It is a sentiment that is shared by Meme.com backer, Digital Finance Group (DFG). According to a statement released by the company’s Head of Investment Joanna Liang, the company believes that Meme.com represents “a promising and innovative way to empower users who find or create trends.”