Web3 Firm Artifact Labs Raises $3.25M From Blue Pool Capital, Animoca, Others

Artifact Labs, a Web3 company that works to preserve records of historical events on the blockchain, has closed a $3.25 million funding round.

The round was led by Blue Pool Capital, with Animoca Ventures also participating. Blue Pool Capital, is a fund that principally invests the wealth of Alibaba founders Jack Ma and Joe Tsai.

Artifact Labs said in the release it plans to utilize the funds to expand the company's operations, emphasizing an increase in developers.

“It’s not about creating new IPs for speculation – for example NFT hype projects – it’s about driving new engagement with historically significant collections by using Web3,” Phillip Pon, CEO of Artifact Labs, said in a release. “We want to carve new space in the younger public’s consciousness for historical brands and artifacts…while supporting these important organizations with new revenue streams to fund their preservation work, we are also solidifying immutable on-chain data preservation through NFTs.”

Artifact Labs was initially incubated by Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post (SCMP). In 2021 the SCMP launched a non-fungible token (NFT) standard called ARTIFACT for recording historical data.

Throughout 2021 and 2022, the newspaper had a brisk business of selling NFTs of its historical front pages, including the handover of Hong Kong to China in 1997, the Avian flu outbreak, the Asian Financial Crisis, and the death of the U.K.'s Princess Diana.

Artifact Labs said in a release that it will be releasing NFT collections as a revenue stream for preservation organizations as well as developing and releasing technology to help institutions preserve their archives on-chain.