EXCLUSIVE: Narval raises 4 million dollars

Raising money is quite a challenge at the moment. Lacking prospects, most start-ups are floundering, but some like Narval are managing to pull through. The French company, which has developed a wallet management solution for businesses, has just raised $4 million in a seed round.

Several venture capital stars have invested in the start-up: BlockTower Capital, Fabric Ventures and a16z (Andreessen Horowitz). The latter is the largest American fund dedicated to Web3. Bpifrance, the French government's financial arm, has also granted a loan to the company.

What appealed most to investors was the fact that Narval is aimed at businesses. "We are a kind of Google Workspace that is used to manage the various wallets of companies," explains Grégory Jessner, co-founder and CEO of Narval. "Narval makes it possible to manage the rights, access and permissions of the various digital assets (NFTs, tokens, wallet)."

The conviction on the side of Narval, which has 7 staff, is that companies are going to have to manage more and more digital assets, particularly internally. "So we need to enable companies to have the right tools for both preservation and management," explains Grégory Jessner, who has just spent several months in the United States on the a16z support programme.

Any examples? Narval allows an employee to use a company NFT without actually owning it. The start-up also allows an employee to issue and distribute NFTs, without being able to offer them for sale on a platform like OpenSea. "We are no longer in a world where cryptos are solely an object of speculation. What takes precedence today is the use of tokens in Web3", says Grégory Jessner.