A software start-up co-founded by new Dragons' Den star Steven Bartlett has secured a $5m investment, according to reports.
Thirdweb, which has offices in San Francisco and London, has been established alongside Furqan Rydhan, who was founding CTO of Bebo and AppLovin.
The company provides tools for developers to build, launch and manage Web3 projects without the need to write lines of code.
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The business has secured a $5m investment from a group of high-profile business leaders including Gary Vaynerchuk and Mark Cuban.
Mr Vaynerchuk is a co-founder of the restaurant reservation software company Resy and Empathy Wines and is chairman of New York-based communications company VaynerX.
Mr Cuban is the owner of the Dallas Mavericks professional basketball team of the NBA and co-owner of 2929 Entertainment.
He is also one of the main 'shark' investors on the ABC reality television series Shark Tank.
Other investors include Ryan Hoover, founder of Product Hunt, Shaan Puri, investor in Deel & Bolt, Imran Khan & Qiao Wang - founders of DeFi Alliance, Soona Amhaz, founder of Volt Capital, Greg Isenberg co-founder & CEO of Late Checkout and advisor to Reddit, Packy Mccormick founder of Not Boring, and Christian Angermayer, founder of Atai Life Sciences and Apeiron Investment Group.
Over 1,000 developers are using thirdweb in the early access stages, whilst major brands including Nike, Disney, Bumble and Meta have stated their intentions to build products for the metaverse, Web3 and NFT spaces.
In a video posted on Twitter announcing the official launch of the company this week, Mr Bartlett said: "Introducing Web3, a version of the internet which will be owned by the people who use and build it - enabled by the blockchain and made possible by NFTs.
"Art, concert tickets, digital fashion, music, video game collectables and even your audience - you can now truly own these things, creating a $1trillion digital economy which is consuming every single industry."
Mr Vaynerchuk added: "I believe in the next 15 years, nobody writes a book with a publisher, they do it through an NFT infrastructure.
"There's not a single sporting event where the ticket is not an NFT because a piece of paper means nothing, but the NFT becomes a forever collectable."
Mr Bartlett added: "But here is the problem - this new technology brings with it a completely new coding language which makes building Web3 applications complex, intimidating and slow. Which is why we build thirdweb.
"Thirdweb makes it stupidly easy to build Web3 applications in a matter of clicks."
Mr Bartlett founded Social Chain in Manchester with Dominic McGregor.
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