A new entertainment media company has raised a $6 million seed round to become a decentralized entertainment platform that allows viewers to own and co-create TV shows based on the non-fungible tokens (NFTs) they hold.
The seed round was led by Paradigm with contributions from the Maveron, Long Journey and 11:11 Media Paris Hilton foundations . Individual investors included Bumble Chief Brand Officer Selby Drummond , Friends with Benefits crypto social club co-founders Trevor McPhaedris and Alex Zhang , Syndicate co-founder Will Papper , and others.
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In March, Mad Realities launched their first experimental dating show, Proof of Love, on YouTube, in which the show’s contestants were voted on by a community of NFT holders. Mad Realities co-founder Alisa Ma , who has experience in product and software development, also sold NFT in March for 4ETH so the eventual owner could nominate the contestants they want on the show (including themselves).
So far, the company has been funded by a community of supporters who contributed 172 ETH or $500,000. With the new investment, the company plans to hire engineers to build the platform and expand the core team.
Co-founder Devin Lutan previously worked on the Clubhouse show “NYU Girls Roasting Tech Guys”, an interactive dating show that allowed anyone in the room to join a live conversation with someone else while others listened live to see if the two could participant to get along or be fried by the moderators. The show featured guests such as Twitch co-founder Justin Kahn and music artist Diplo.
“Mad Realities is the MTV of a new media network that doesn’t exist yet,” the company said in a statement. Our shows are a social experience from conception to consumption. We start with a dating show, but we view all reality shows as a community of content, a social experience to be shared.”
The long-term vision is to rethink how people consume and interact with the content they watch, with the ultimate goal of becoming a decentralized autonomous organization where NFT holders, not company leaders, decide what happens. Future iterations of the company will include a governance token and going beyond the dating genre to co-create new types of shows.
