Quick take:
- Animoca Brands completed a $359M funding round on Tuesday, valuing the blockchain VC firm at $5 billion.
- Yat Siu’s firm also extended its investment in the NFT and GameFi, leading Burnt Finance’s $8M funding round.
- Animoca will use the funding to make more strategic acquisitions and investments and build products.
Leading GameFi and NFT investor Animoca Brands on Tuesday completed a $359 million funding round at a valuation of $5 billion. The round was led by the current investor, the New York-based venture capital fund, Liberty City Ventures.
The blockchain company’s founder, Yat Siu said the funds will be used to finance more strategic acquisitions and investments, whilst also developing new products and licenses for intellectual property.
Other participants in the funding round included billionaire investors such as George Soros’ Soros Fund Management, Winklevoss Capital and Sequoia China.
“In addition, the several new and notable investors we have brought on board represent a powerful expansion of our partnerships and alliances,” Siu added.
This was Animoca Brands’ fourth round of funding since last May, during which its value has rocketed to a multi-billion venture capital firm. Last week, Siu revealed that the company’s total investments were worth $16 billion, as he narrated the company’s vision for the future.
The latest fundraise came barely a day after the firm led Burnt Finance’s $8 million funding round, deepening its investments in NFTs and GameFi.
Burnt Finance’s latest capital raise also attracted investments from Alameda Research, Multicoin Capital, Valor Capital, Figment, Spartan Capital, HashKey, Terra, and Fantom.
The Solana-based protocol said the funding will be used to expand its workforce and build more partnerships with artists and other Solana-based projects.
Burnt Finance’s NFT marketplace launch aligns well with Alameda Brands’ vision of investing in disruptive products within the NFT and GameFi space. The marketplace will feature English, Dutch, and Buy Now auctions, and also wants to become the hub for NFTs by integrating DeFi functionality.
The Solana-based protocol’s NFT marketplace will support various DeFi features such as NFT lending, liquidity mining with staking incentives, fractionalization, and GameFi, thereby providing permissionless access to NFTs.
The platform has already locked 160,000 users on its waitlist and claims to have low fees and fast speeds.
Commenting on the partnership, Siu pointed out the importance of a permissionless ecosystem in the open metaverse, saying “Minting and trading assets in a permissionless ecosystem is crucially important to the economic groundwork of the open metaverse.”
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