Tessera
Paradigm led both of its rounds; it wound down nine months after the second
A protocol, launched in 2021 as Fractional, that let groups of people buy and trade shares of expensive NFTs such as CryptoPunks and Bored Apes.
- Capital raised (announced)
- Estimated
Recorded announced backing; this is separate from cash received, customer deposits and money recovered.
- Team size at the Series A
Reported by SiliconANGLE in August 2022, before planned hiring; not a later headcount.
Funding
| Round | Date | Announced | Investors |
|---|---|---|---|
| Seed | 2021 | ||
| Series A | 2022 |
Announced is what was said at the time. Cash actually received is rarely disclosed and is not assumed to match.
People
| Name | Role | Period | Now | Last checked |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Andy Chorlian | — | Building @mnstr, a better way to collect trading cards | Oct 2026 | |
| Nejc Krajnik | Jan 2021 – end | CTO, Monster - mnstr (since November 2025) | Oct 2026 | |
| Shant Marootian | — | Unknown | — |
Timeline
19 August 2021
Owners of a fractionalized NFT received interchangeable tokens that could be traded on decentralized exchanges.
17 August 2022
The team planned a second version, starting with a trial on Nouns NFTs, in which each share would itself be an NFT.
12 May 2023
How it ended
On 12 May 2023 co-founder Andy Chorlian announced that Tessera and its sister marketplace Escher would wind down all operations over the following weeks. He said the decision followed a review of possible market scenarios, the company's structure and its financial situation, that Escher's targets for profitability did not add up against the cost of reaching them, and that the company wanted to act while it could still do so responsibly and support its employees.
Still alive
Open spot
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Sources
9 sources behind this page.
- 1Paradigm-Backed NFT Ownership Platform Tessera is Shutting Down · CoinDesk · May 2023
- 2Fractional Rebrands, Raises $20M to Expand Collective NFT Ownership · Decrypt · Aug 2022
- 3LinkedIn profile of Nejc Krajnik · LinkedIn (self-published profile, viewed by a person) · user-editable
- 4Collective NFT ownership protocol Fractional raises $20M and rebrands as Tessera · SiliconANGLE · Aug 2022
- 5'Fractional' NFT platform completes $7.9 million in seed funding · The Block · Aug 2021
- 6Fractional NFT project Tessera to shut down amid challenging crypto market · The Block · May 2023
- 7X account lookup: @andy8052 · twitterapi.io (X data provider)
- 8X search: @andy8052 posts about Fractional or Tessera before June 2023 · twitterapi.io (X data provider)
- 9Fractional NFT ownership platform Tessera shuts down · Web3 Is Going Great
Every figure above is clickable and opens the sources behind it. Copies were stored when each source was read, so a citation still resolves after the page it came from is gone.