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| Yuga Labs raised $450 million to build the NFT Metaverse |
Yuga Labs, which owns three of the largest NFT brands on the market, has announced that it has raised $450 million in funding worth $4 billion.
Game company Metaverse Animoca, its subsidiary The Sandbox, and cryptocurrency platform FTX are among the investors participating in the latest funding round.
NFT revenue will reach $25 billion in 2021, up from $94.9 million last year.
The team behind Bored Ape Yacht Club plans to use the money to build a media empire around the NFTs, starting with the games and their Metaverse project.
The team describes their Metaverse project, Otherside, as an MMORPG that aims to connect the wider world of NFT.
Willie Arono, co-founder of Bored Ape Yacht Club, which goes by the pseudonym Gordon Goner, said the team aims to create an interoperable world that is both playable and decentralized.
The announcement comes just weeks after Yuga Labs took a major step in consolidating the NFT domain, acquiring CryptoPunks and Meebits from Larva Labs.
The acquisition brings together three of NFT's most profitable groups under one roof. It also provides Yuga Labs with a larger list of IP addresses to use in developing game plans and the metaverse.
Last week, the company also launched its digital currency, ApeCoin. It is independently controlled and used as the base currency of the Yuga Labs project.
CEO Nicole Muniz said Yuga Labs is working with many different game studios to bring the other side to life.
The game will not be limited to Bored Ape owners, the company plans to create development tools that will allow NFTs from other projects to operate in their worlds.
Yoga Labs has $4 billion in funding
There is a lot of talk about the Metaverse project these days. But Yuga Labs believes other companies have a misconception about the metaverse, giving the startup a chance to differentiate itself.
Yuga Labs declined to provide a release schedule for Otherside. There are also plans to release the playable game to earn later this year.
The course, led by Andreessen Horowitz, is one of the largest to date for NFTs.
Andreessen Horowitz invests heavily in Web3. He previously funded OpenSea, Dapper Labs, and Coinbase. It also joined a funding round from game studio Animoca and crypto firms Coinbase and MoonPay, among others.
Chris Lyons, general partner of Andreessen Horowitz, has joined the startup's board of directors. Andreessen Horowitz said: Yuga Labs, like other Web3 startups, is a strong force against companies like Meta.
Interestingly enough, Andreessen Horowitz co-founder Mark Andreessen is a Meta board member and early investor in Facebook.
The company earned $137 million last year. This is achieved by charging a percentage of transactions associated with their NFT brand at a 95% profit margin.
NFT groups have around 40,000 users at most. The company released the game for a limited time.