Yoooooo. What’s up, everybody?
We’re thrilled to announce that Calaxy has secured a bag of $26 million in strategic funding. Shoutout to The HBAR Foundation and Animoca Brands for leading the way. And big thanks to Polygon Studios for getting in on the party.
In case some of y’all are new here, please allow us to reintroduce ourselves.
Our name is Calaxy and we’re the open social marketplace for Creators, by Creators. We were co-founded by tech entrepreneur Solo Ceesay and his business partner Spencer Dinwiddie. (Seen here ⬇️ absolutely posterizing Rudy Gobert in the 2022 NBA Playoffs.)
We’re in the business reinventing the way Creators and their fans interact and we’re revolutionizing content economics in the process. The Calaxy mobile and web applications rock sleek designs similar to social media platforms you might already be familiar with (see: gram, Insta). But, under the hood we’re harnessing the power of one of the world’s most efficient distributed ledger technologies (DLTs). What’s up, Hedera?
The result sets a new standard for the way fans interact with the celebrities they adore, and gives Creators improved agency and ownership over their personal brands.
Calaxy started as a bunch of documents in a folder on Spencer’s laptop. He and Solo were working together in an effort to securitize Dinwiddie’s NBA contract back in 2018. Through that process, they realized that Creators needed a better path toward monetization.
Solo was a rising star on Wall Street. A young, Black, Wharton-educated, first-generation American with traditional finance experience and a deep passion for emerging technologies, Ceesay realized that he was in the perfect position to affect change and recalibrate the Creator Economy using a more equitable framework. So, in 2020 he bounced to become Calaxy COO. Two years and $33.5M in total strategic funding later, the 27-year-old St. Louis native is now taking the reins as Calaxy’s Chief Executive Officer. Spencer’s transitioning to a role as Executive Chair, where he’ll remain focused on bringing Calaxy’s vision to life (and dunking on members of the NBA’s All-Defensive Team).
Solo and the Calaxy team are gonna stay hungry and humble as they use this additional funding to add talent to an impressive roster of Creators that already includes future NBA Hall of Famer Dwight Howard, musician Teyana Taylor, The Bachelor’s Matt James, and three-time Pro Bowler Ezekiel Elliott.
Calaxy is the first decentralized application (dApp) built on The Creator’s Galaxy—a decentralized protocol with open-source governance and a total coin market cap over $500M. The Creator’s Galaxy protocol is powered by Calaxy Tokens ($CLXY), a Hedera Token Services asset of which one billion were minted on Hedera back in April. If none of those words mean anything to you, we encourage you to ask the engineer in your life and/or slide into our Chief Technology Officer’s DMs.
This strategic raise and executive leadership transition mark a monumental step forward for Calaxy, the Creator Economy and Web3 as a whole. We genuinely appreciate the continued support and interest demonstrated by our growing community as we work tirelessly to create (pun very much intended) a simpler, fairer and better way for Creators to connect with their fans and bring their brands to life.
Calaxy is social media built different. Plan accordingly.
