Blockchain game startup Animoca Brands raises $ 75M at $ 5.9B rating
Launch of the Blockchain gaming platform Animoca Brands Corp. Ltd. has raised $ 75.32 million in new financing to fund strategic acquisitions, investments and product development, secure licenses for popular intellectual property and promote the open metaverse.
Investors in the round included Liberty City Ventures, Kingsway Capital, Alpha Wave Ventures, 10T, SG Spring Limited Partnership Fund, Generation Highway, Cosmic Summit Investments and others. The new funding was raised to a value of 5.9 billion dollars.
Founded in 2011, Animoca Brands specializes in blockchain, gamification and artificial intelligence technologies to promote digital property rights and contribute to the creation of an open metaverse.
The company offers a portfolio of products, including cryptocurrency tokens, original games and branded games related to other companies and products. Animoca has worked with intellectual property, including those from The Walt Disney Co., World Wrestling Entertainment Inc., Snoop Dogg, The Walking Dead, Power Rangers, MotoGP and Formula E.
Animoca is also heavily invested in non-fungible tokens, which can be used in metaverse-related gaming projects that include digital real estate for web users. These are distributed using decentralized Web3 technology with blockchain infrastructure.
The company says it uses technologies including blockchain and NFTs to deliver true digital ownership of users’ virtual assets and data, enabling different Defi and GameFi capabilities (including play-and-earn), asset interoperability and an open source framework that can lead to greater justice for all participants in the open metaverse.
As mentioned when Animoca raised funding in January, NFTs allow players direct ownership of in-game items as virtual assets and create real-world economies. Animoca’s mission is to use these assets to build a future where players earn cryptocurrency assets while playing games that can also be traded outside the game for other cryptocurrencies and traditional money, such as dollars.
“Digital property rights represent a socially defining generational change that is affecting everyone online and will set the stage for the emergence of the open metaverse,” said Yat Siu, co-founder and CEO of Animoca Brands, in a statement.
Including the new funding, Animoca Brands has raised $ 675.3 million to date, according to Crunchbase. Previous investors include C Ventures, Delta Fund, Gemini Frontier Fund, Soros Fund Management and Winklevoss Capital.
