Giggles, a social media app that enables trading of all user-generated content to form markets for videos, memes, news, and creators, announced $1.2M in pre-seed funding on April 7, 2026. The company raised this oversubscribed round in 2025, led by 1kxnetwork, with participation from multiple angel investors and venture firms. Giggles defines itself as a TikTok-style platform where users trade content, creating financial incentives for early discovery of viral material and blending social attention with market economics.
Funding Overview
Giggles secured $1.2 million in pre-seed funding, with 1kxnetwork leading the investment. The round closed in 2025 following the app’s first beta launch and was oversubscribed, reflecting strong user interest.
Key funding facts:
- Amount: $1.2M.
- Stage: Pre-seed.
- Timing: Raised in 2025; announced April 7, 2026.
- Trigger: Followed beta topping U.S. and Canada App Store charts (top 40).
The funds support a public launch in the United States, enabling real-money trading on content for the first time, as the broader startup ecosystem continues to see activity with developments like Pixie Chess Raises $5.2 Million highlighting investor appetite for experimental platforms.
About the Company
Giggles operates as a social media app where all content becomes tradable.. This setup forms markets that reward early identification of popular videos, memes, news, or creators with financial returns. The platform builds a social graph combining user attention and market dynamics. Giggles launched its beta in August 2025.
User metrics:
- Beta users: 150,000+.
- Videos traded: 10,000+.
- Waitlist: 400,000 sign-ups, mainly from U.S. college campuses and high schools.
- Adoption: Viral spread in high schools and colleges; one early user joined the team.
Giggles’ founders are Justin and Edwin. They met on the Hypixel Skyblock Minecraft server as top players aged 13 and 14. Justin built a dropshipping business, became a YouTuber earning over $250,000 by age 15, and founded Mediababy, a short-form video publisher generating billions of monthly views. Mediababy consulted for billion-dollar companies and government organizations. Edwin founded MyBite, a social food delivery app, and raised $200,000 for it at age 16.
Both received full-ride scholarships to Babson College but dropped out last year. The team includes members with experience working with PewDiePie and engineering at Google.
Investors
1kxnetwork invested in Giggles as the lead. Additional participants joined the pre-seed round.
Other investors:
- Rohan Benjamin
- Amir F
- Carter Kev
- Marc Baghadjian
- Shamiss Sender
- Social Graph VC
- Virtuals_io
- Virtuals VC
- BainCap VC
- Scout
- Angels from OpenAI and Bain Capital.
Sources describe participation from Virtuals Protocol, Social Graph Ventures, Noar Ventures, and Night Capital.
Market Context
Giggles targets social media with tradable content, where users doomscroll feeds and content discovery links to financial rewards through trading. This mirrors dynamics in meme coins, where social behavior drives price discovery.
The beta used aura points for trading, while the public version introduces real money. Giggles cites aligning conditions across infrastructure, behavioral shifts, legal frameworks, and geopolitics, with current traction including 400,000 waitlist users and an initial rollout focused on the United States.
