• by Colin Kirkland , February 8, 2023

Sesame Labs, a web3 marketing platform looking to build a marketing stack for the future of the internet, has raised $4.5 million in a seed-funding round.

Founders Vinay Jain and Aman Jain -- Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook and Twitter alums -- say they will use the money to scale its engineering team, bring its products to market and grow its user base.

The funding round is being led by Wing Venture Capital and Patron, with participation from DoubleJump, Forte, MoonFire, Samsung, Twin Ventures, Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan, Sorare former COO Ryan Spoon, and others.

Sesame Labs offers a web3 native marketing stack, which includes a campaign management platform, advertising network and CRM. The singular platform invites web3 companies to develop targeted marketing campaigns that leverage competitor data, surface cross-channel customer insights and create in–app engagement rewards.

“There hasn’t been a systematic way where people can actually interact with web3 businesses,” Vinay Jain told TechCrunch. “So it became clear to us that the whole marketing stack is completely missing in web3.”

Google Analytics didn’t work, Jain added, because it is not able to track data on the blockchain, such as NFTs being bought on OpenSea via a web3 game. Therefore, Sesame Labs is attempting to provide a playbook that will help marketers navigate this new space.

Sesame Labs, which is built on the Polygon chain, launched in private beta in September 2022 to test its platform with over a dozen web3 gaming companies, like Decentraland Games, Ethermon, and League of Kingdoms.

According to the founders, the platform currently offers marketers user profiles based on on-chain, social, and in-game activity, as well as filters that identify high-quality users via targeting and marketing segmentation tools that provide data on and off-chain.

Customers can also message users directly within the platform, search for players within a specific target audience, and integrate no-code in-game quests with dedicated landing pages that automatically dispense rewards.

Han Yoo, COO at “League of Kingdoms” creator NOD Games, said that Sesame Labs helped the company drive a surge in social engagement on Twitter and Discord for the launch of its upcoming NFT collection, as well as over 700 NFT sales within two weeks.

“We want to be the company that defines what ads on web3 look like,” Vinay Jain told TechCrunch. “Today, there’s a lot of companies building different parts of the marketing stack individually [ … ] but I don’t think anyone is thinking purely from a marketing standpoint and we think the right company will build the entire stack from the ground up, not just a piece of it.”