👊🏽 Special Edition: Ganas and I invested in Masa!
This is a special edition of Lolita's Newsletter, monthly newsletter of curated actionable insights and resources for over 20,000 underestimated founders, funders, and friends.
Hi all! I’m so excited to share with you that Ganas Ventures and I joined the Masa family, and so can you! Recently voted #1 project in the exclusive Binance Accelerator, Masa is kicking off a fundraise this week.
🏃🏽♀️💨 Catch up.
Last March, we launched Ganas Ventures. Since then, we invested in Latitud’s seed round co-led by a16z/NFX, Around’s seed round led by Leap Global Partners, Shappi’s seed round led by Sixers Innovation Lab, Leadsales’s pre-seed round led by Ulu Ventures, Papaya’s pre-seed round led by Chingona Ventures, and Storybook’s seed round alongside Magma Partners. We’ve also raised capital from unicorn founders and LP/VC thought leaders. And Ganas and I were featured on the Nasdaq Tower for our leadership in equity within the startup-VC ecosystem! Now, we’re excited to announce our investment in Masa!
Ganas Ventures and I have invested in Masa, backed by some of the smartest money in web 3, such as Digital Currency Group, GoldenTree, OP Crypto, and GSR.
💰 Founders, apply for investment here. 👊🏽 LPs, apply to invest in Ganas here.
🦄 👊🏽 Masa investment TL;DR.
There’s a lot to love about Masa. They are…
visionary founders with market-startup-fit in the web 3 space
pioneering the Google Analytics for web 3
in hypergrowth in a bear market: 500K users and 1.5M product usage in 11 months
backed by web 3 leaders and investors
Masa. Masa is building an intelligent growth and analytics platform for web 3. You can think of them as Google Analytics for global web 3 users, empowering data-driven growth without sacrificing user privacy. Using Masa, web 3 projects can effectively acquire, analyze and retain users, even in a bear market.
There is an overwhelming amount of unified on- and off-chain data, and a wild west of global users in web 3. However, web 3 projects are having a hard time navigating this data, bottlenecking their growth at hype-driven temporary growth. Masa has built the fastest-growing proprietary behavioral dataset of global web 3 users. Leveraging the power of AI, builders can efficiently target, analyze and retain users and grow beyond the hype in web 3.
Team. Masa is led by FinTech and web 3 serial co-founders Brendan Playford and Calanthia Mei and a top-caliber, globally-decentralized team of 13 FTEs. Brendan brings blockchain and data infrastructure expertise. He got his start in blockchain in 2013 as one of the earliest solo miners of DOGE and previously built a horizontally scalable blockchain and a financial data infrastructure company, which collectively raised over $50M in funding. Calanthia Mei brings 10 years of experience building, scaling, and investing in Web 2 and 3 fintech companies. She’s invested in over 25 hyper-growth fintech startups (e.g., Tala, Acorns, Plaid), led PayPal’s web 3 investment strategy, and most recently scaled a payment startup from 10 to 450 FTEs to an acquisition. Web 3 serial CTO Sebastian Gerske is the Head of Engineering at Masa. He co-founded Ocean Protocol and scaled Primelab’s NFT-Maker to enable 700,000 new wallets generated in 24h hours. Web 3 community expert Amateo Ra is Head of Marketing at Masa. While VP of Marketing at Voyager, he scaled the crypto app from a few hundred to 3.5 million users.
Traction. Masa has quickly amassed 500K users on 5 major blockchains and over 1.5M proprietary data identifiers since August 2022. They launched a new B2B product in May and already went live with over 60 partners in the past 8 weeks. Masa was recently voted as the #1 project on the exclusive Binance Accelerator’s demo day, standing out from a cohort of the top 1% of projects selected by Binance.
Market. There are hundreds of millions of wallets and billions of unstructured data on the blockchain. Millions of off-chain data are untapped, untracked, and un-utilized. There is no one-stop shop for web 3 community builders to understand their users’ behavior both on-chain and off-chain. Web 3 projects spend millions on airdrops but don’t even know how to retain their users. It's crazy to think 90% of Uniswap airdrop recipients sold their tokens without ever using the product. This leaves projects stuck in temporary hype cycles, with no intelligent data and no understanding of the community they spent so much money on to attract. Using Masa, in just 3 lines of code, builders can access and analyze a complete view of their users and leverage the power of AI to target, analyze and grow their users beyond the hype in web 3.
Community-driven. Masa is all about the community. Masa’s product is intended for web 3 leaders to intelligently grow their communities. Masa also has built a global community of 200K members across Discord, Telegram, and Twitter. It runs a robust global ambassador program of over 300 Masa Ambassadors from over 20 countries.
Roadmap. The Masa growth engine is live and integrated with 60+ partners. The Masa Analytics engine is in alpha and integrating with first partners.
😇🚀 You can also join the Masa family.
Join the Masa family by becoming a Ganas LP. If you are an institutional investor in web 3, Masa just started a $5M fundraise, respond to this email, and I can connect you with the co-founders.
✨ Lolita Taub, GP at Ganas Ventures | twitter | luma
Disclaimer: Ganas Ventures is a 506c fund that allows us to publicly solicit for our raise. All are welcome to apply to become an LP; however, commitments to Ganas Ventures will only be accepted by accredited investors.