Bored Ape closes $450 million round, plans to build media empire around NFT
Bored Ape closes $450 million round, plans to build media empire around NFT
Yuga Labs, owner of three of the largest NFT brands in the market, announced on the 23rd that it closed a $450 million financing at a $4 billion valuation.The team behind this Bored Ape Yacht Club plans to use the money to build a media empire around NFT, starting with games and its own meta-universe projects.
The team describes their metaverse project, called Otherside, as an MMORPG that aims to connect the broader NFT universe. They want to create an "interoperable world" that is "gamified" and "completely decentralized.says Wylie Aronow, co-founder of the Bored Ape Yacht Club, who goes by the pseudonym Gordon Goner." We think the true number one player experience will be managed by the players."
Yuga Labs has taken a major step to consolidate its NFT sector, announcing the acquisition of CryptoPunks and Meebits from Larva Labs just weeks after the acquisition. The acquisition brings together three of the most lucrative NFT families into one, giving Yuga Labs a larger roster of IP to leverage in developing its gaming and meta-universe plans. The company also launched a cryptocurrency, ApeCoin, last week; the token will be managed independently and used as the primary currency in Yuga Labs' properties.
CEO Nicole Muniz said Yuga Labs is working with several different game studios to make its new project Otherside a reality. The game will not be limited to Bored Ape holders, and the company plans to create development tools that will allow NFTs from other projects to work in their worlds." We are opening the doors to an effective walled garden and welcome everyone."
Meta-universe projects are popular right now, such as Facebook renaming itself Meta, but Yuga Labs thinks other companies have the wrong idea for meta-universes, giving startups a chance to stand out. yuga Labs co-founder Greg Solano says people don't bond by staying together in a shared virtual space with nothing to do Instead, people bond because they are put in a position where they have to work together.
"The reason you play with people and make friends is because you think they're awesome," Solano said." Basically, we don't think a deep social experience comes from a basic one Zoom chat and say hi everywhere. Yuga Labs declined to provide a timeline on the release of Otherside, and also plans to launch a play-to-earn game later this year.
The funding round, one of the largest to date for NFT, was led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), which has been investing heavily in the Web3 space. It previously funded OpenSea, Dapper Labs and Coinbase. a16z was joined in this round by game studio Animoca Brands and cryptocurrency companies Coinbase and MoonPay, among others. a16z general partner Chris Lyons will join the board of Yuga Labs. The Financial Times first reported on the funding talks last month.
"To me, Yuga Labs, along with these other emerging Web3 companies, is an important counterweight to companies like Meta," Chris Dixon, who leads a16z's cryptocurrency division, told The Verge. "There's a not-so-optimistic future where Meta is going to be this dominant digital experience provider, with all the money and control going to that company." (Interestingly, a16z co-founder Marc Andreessen is on Meta's board of directors and invested in Facebook in the early days).
So farYuga Labs has a successful track record. A leaked promotional material shows that the company made $137 million last year, mostly by taking a cut of deals related to its NFT brand, with a staggering 95% profit margin.(Yuga Labs declined to comment on the numbers in the document.)
However, the company's commitment is quite low. Its NFT series has up to 40,000 subscribers, according to OpenSea, and the company has only released one game in a limited time. This means that Yuga Labs has raised hundreds of millions of dollars through a scratch, lucrative art project to build a game company that incorporates Web3 technology.
That success is what investors are considering when funding Yuga Labs." They've built this very vibrant community and this cultural phenomenon," Dixon said. But the company is ultimately making the same big bet that many others are making now: that some form of metaverse project will be the next explosive event. Now, all they have to do is build it.
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