NFT producer RECUR lets artists and brands collect recurring royalties on digital assets

RECUR Co-Founders & Co-CEOs Trevor George and Zach Bruch join Yahoo Finance Live to discuss their company's model to develop NFTs under brands, NFT licensing, and shared communities with cryptocurrency markets.

Video Transcript

- Recur, a company that designs and develops, NFTs recently landed a $50 million, series A funding round at a $333 million valuation. And for more on the outlook for the company, we're joined by Trevor George who is the Recur co-founder and co-CEO as well as Zach Bruch who is the co-founder and co-CEO. Gentlemen, thanks for taking the time here with us today. Trevor, first question to you, why was this model appealing to investors?

TREVOR GEORGE: Well, I think, you know, I come from an e-commerce background. And I've seen retail evolve over the past decade, and a licensed brand would license out its IP and allow someone else to sell that product to a retailer and eventually to the consumer.

But over the course of the evolution of direct to consumer, those brands that have licensing departments want to approach their fan directly. And so that's exactly what Recur does. We create the brand's experience under their brand name. And Recur is really the intel inside. And so it's the right alignment of interest between us, the brand, and their fan.

EMILY MCCORMICK: Zach, this is Emily here. Thanks so much for joining us. In order to better understand the value proposition of Recur, in absence of Recur how much are artists or companies that you work with standing to lose out in royalties when their NFTs go to another platform and they aren't able to collect those recurring royalties?

ZACH BRUCH: So I think it's really important to remember what NFTs are all about, and that's inclusivity, making sure everybody can participate. So one of the things we're really proud of, we coauthored something called EIP2981, which is the recurring royalty standard on Ethereum which allows anybody to collect a recurring royalty no matter where that asset trades. So an athlete, an artist, a brand, whoever can continue to participate in the sales in the future of their work. And we're really proud to have coauthored that and to implement that in our smart contracts throughout our experiences.

- Zach, just to follow up on that, what is your take rate as a result of what you're offering here?

ZACH BRUCH: I can't give you all the secrets. We've got to save that for another time. But as I mentioned, it's really important for us to make sure that everybody in the community can continue to participate and make sure their assets can go everywhere.

And that's why we took a chain-agnostic approach. That way, we had the appropriate alignment of interests between ourselves and all the brands that we work with as well, so the artists and the consumers and whoever it is can take those assets throughout the ecosystem to a metaverse on one blockchain, to a marketplace on another blockchain, to a game or social media app maybe somewhere else, ultimately giving them the widest range of utility of these assets. And that's what we feel is most important, being chain-agnostic and being interoperable.

EMILY MCCORMICK: Trevor, I'm wondering, are there certain types of customers, whether it's artists, whether it's sports teams or sports individuals, that this Recur model works best for? Or how much interoperability is there actually between these different stakeholders?

TREVOR GEORGE: Yeah, I think there has been some market validation across sports and definitely character IP. But anything digital can be an NFT, right? We can prove the ownership of any digital asset whether a JPEG or a movie file on the blockchain. So whether you're an artist or you're an athlete, you come from the sports genre or the entertainment genre or the character genre or something else, there's opportunity to create products and monetize your IP not just once, but forever downstream.

The interoperability is actually quite significant today and is being developed as we speak every day. So I don't think it's to any one single brand. Certainly, the ones that are already inherently collectible today in the physical world make them great prospects in the digital world as well.

- Certainly. And Trevor, kind of adding on to this $50 million here that you've just raised, how are you're deploying this capital?

TREVOR GEORGE: I think it's three components. One, to expand our licensing partnerships and bring more brands and IP to those fans in the digital world. Two, our people, the dream team. We are scaling at a significant rate.

We're at about 140 people right now. And lastly, from a marketing perspective, educating the world on this industry, it's going to take a lot. And so bringing that energy through marketing is definitely important so that people understand what an NFT is and how to collect them.

EMILY MCCORMICK: Zach, to follow up on that point with Trevor, what has the education component of this actually looked like? How have you been speaking with brands, individuals to really make the case for using Recur and NFTs overall?

ZACH BRUCH: So my background comes from the crypto space. I've been involved professionally in the space for about five years now. And I started at Kraken, and then from there I went to a traditional trading firm called GRW and was on the Cumberland desk.

And the reason I'm bringing this up is because the education is very reminiscent of those times when you would go and meet and try to share what crypto really is. Except this time around, the brands, the IP, the artist, the musicians, they really understand it a lot better. And it's clear that NFTs are the product market fit for crypto today.

And because they're latching on, they want to participate. And they understand that fan engagement can happen at a much greater rate. And the fans can really participate and get involved and also find greater community amongst themselves.

So we've went out. We've educated tons of global brands. And we've actually signed multi-year deals with a ton of them, some of which we've been public about. And we're really excited to bring those to market in the coming weeks, months, and years to come.

- You know, just as I'm looking through some of the backers that you've already got, it's some interesting names. Of course, Gary Vee, noted bull in the NFT space. Jason Derulo, just great at TikTok and music as well.

But Joe Lubin here sticks out to me because when we think about a co-founder in Ethereum that he is and the consensus methodology as well plus the Winklevi that have also invested as well, their Gemini company who already has some of their own inputs for the SEC and trying to get some approvals on their front. All of that considered, how do those voices being involved with the brand continue to kind of matriculate you towards what the offering could actually look like and what the user experience could actually be at the end of the day? Zach, I'll toss that one to you.

ZACH BRUCH: Yeah, I think it's really simple. Everything comes back to being authentic. So how can we bring the largest brands into the space in a really authentic way that they understand? And we have some of the best brand people in the world as investors.

And then also as it relates to the crypto community, how will we bring them into this crypto ecosystem, into this digital world, in an authentic way? And you know, that's one of the reasons why Trevor and I are so uniquely positioned as a team and as our greater team to go tackle this issue because we address both those sides and are able to make a really cohesive offering in a way that's really authentic and that people can really understand from both sides. And we've been really lucky to have such an incredible group of backers from day one.

- Congratulations on this most recent funding round. We'll have to check back in the future. Trevor George who is the Recur co-founder and co-CEO as well as Zach Bruch who is the Recur co-founder and co-CEO. Gentlemen, thanks for taking the time here with us today. I appreciate it.