The blockchain-based, machine learning-powered NFT appraisal platform raised a $22M Series A2 round last month to fund R&D at the intersection of NFTs & DeFi
NEW YORK–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Upshot, a blockchain-based protocol providing industry-leading non-fungible token (NFT) appraisals, today announced the hiring of Orestis Tsinalis as Head of Data & Machine Learning. Tsinalis will report directly to CEO Nick Emmons and will be responsible for leading Upshot’s growing data and machine learning teams, as well as improving the company’s ML models to deliver real-time NFT appraisals for the market.
Prior to joining Upshot, Tsinalis served as Head of Quantitative Research and as a Quantitative Trader at GHCO – one of the fastest-growing liquidity providers specializing in ETFs. While at GHCO, Tsinalis built and scaled pricing models for the company’s global ETF book, developed new strategies for trading crypto ETPs, coins and futures, and built the ML infrastructure for backtesting high-frequency trading strategies. Tsinalis also served as the Principal Data Scientist at abrdn, a top-five UK asset manager with over $600b in AUM. There, he led the company’s central Data Science team, successfully built out natural language processing-based signals, ML models for accounting fraud detection and company fundamentals prediction, and NLP-based searches for news, transcripts and reports. He received his Ph.D. and MSc in computer science from Imperial College London.
“It’s incredibly exciting to be joining Upshot at this stage of their rapid growth as the reality of bringing high-quality NFT appraisals and analytics to our community edges closer,” said Tsinalis. “NFTs are financial instruments with immense potential to transform our economy, and Upshot is uniquely positioned to become the backbone of this new wave of NFT-based DeFi applications.”
Last month, Upshot, announced a $22 million Series A2 funding round led by Polychain Capital. The round is being used to fund R&D for Upshot’s pricing models, finance its novel decentralized finance (DeFi) x NFT primitives, and create additional developer tools to allow others to build novel DeFi x NFT primitives leveraging Upshot’s price feeds. The company also recently introduced Upshot Analytics Beta – the dashboard for NFT data, live appraisals and analytics.
“We’re beyond excited to have Orestis on board as we move towards this next stage of growth. He is one of the most accomplished individuals in his field and has a unique combination of quantitative research experience at both large-scale crypto operations as well as some of the largest asset management firms in the world,” said Upshot CEO Nick Emmons. “The rate at which our pricing models will gain further sophistication under Orestis’s leadership – both in terms of breadth, number of NFT collections appraised, and depth, how accurate our pricing models are – will be unprecedented.”
About Upshot
Upshot is a blockchain-based protocol providing industry-leading non-fungible token (NFT) appraisals. By delivering accurate and trusted expert appraisals, Upshot enables the creation of solutions at the intersection of decentralized finance (DeFi) and NFTs – for the industry and themselves. Upshot Analytics is currently available in private Beta and will open to the general public soon. The Upshot API is currently available and being used by teams to inform their projects. You can learn more about Upshot, its capabilities and sign up for the Beta at https://app.upshot.xyz/.
Contacts
Christopher Kingsley
ck@upshot.io
