Former Sotheby’s CEO, Eminem Team Up With Bessemer For $30 Million MakersPlace Round

Former Sotheby’s CEO, Eminem Team Up With Bessemer For $30 Million MakersPlace Round

Dannie Chu hopes to create the world's most trusted marketplace for premium digital art.

In 2020, Ryoma Ito, the cofounder and CMO of MakersPlace, a startup that mints and sells non-fungible tokens (NFTs), approached Christie’s, the centuries’ old auction house, with an idea. MakersPlace would create an NFT of the digital artist Beeple’s collage-style project Everydays: The First 5000 Days, and Christie’s would sell it old-school-style, as if it were a painting bound by a tactile frame. Christie’s agreed, and in March the artwork went for over $69 million, about the same amount that Los Angeles’ Getty Museum once spent on an 1881 painting by the French impressionist Edouard Manet. When the auction came around, the buyer—who goes by the alias MetaKovan—was primed and ready to go: Ito had already approached him with the idea of bidding, and MetaKovan was all in.