Chennai teen entrepreneurs raise $1 mn for NFT venture

Chennai: Diginoor.io, a NFT marketplace founded by Chennai teenagers Shaamil Karim & Yash Rathod, has raised $1 million funding from Contrary Capital, Polygon Fund, Sandeep Nailwal, CRED’s Kunal Shah, Abdul Wahab Al-Halabi (MD at Embassy Capital), and others.

Diginoor, which launched in 2021 with Rajinikanth movie NFTs, aims to make NFT adoption mainstream in India with curated Indian entertainment content adapted for the web 3.0 space. Some of their partners already include India’s oldest and largest production houses like AVM Productions, Reliance Entertainment and a host of other major studios. The company said it was also the first to introduce the option to buy NFTs using debit and credit cards — a first in the industry. NFTs (Non fungible tokens) are digital representations/assets representing real-world objects like art, music, videos, etc. and have recently taken the tech world by storm. “We plan on using these funds to hire a talented team across functions and tap into the plethora of content in the Indian media industry,” co-founder of Diginoor, Shaamil Karim said.

“We’re here to build the web 3.0 revolution, homegrown out of India, through cinema & gaming. We’re building exciting projects at Diginoor using NFTs and smart contract-powered decentralized gaming,” co-founder, Diginoor, Yash Rathod said.

Both Karim and Rathod graduated from Sishya School in 2021. Shaamil is a computer science student at an Ivy League institute - Dartmouth College and Yash is a computer science student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. They’re both currently on a break from university pursuing Diginoor full-time.

“We're currently on academic leave from our colleges to pursue Diginoor. In recent times, colleges have been more flexible and supportive of taking breaks to pursue entrepreneurial ventures,” Karim said. The duo said they intend to give 100% of their time to building Diginoor ‘while continuing to quench [their] thirst for knowledge through traditional or new forms of learning.’

Diginoor has sold out its first NFT collection from the Rajinikanth starrer ‘Sivaji’. They recently launched NFTs from ‘Chandramukhi’ and ‘Kabali’ as well which included songs from AR Rahman and metaverse versions of movie set props. It also plans to start selling Bollywood NFTs along with exclusive music and celebrity NFTs.