Other investors included Animoca Brands,
its subsidiary The Sandbox and the crypto exchange FTX Trading Ltd. Yuga said
in a statement that the round values the firm at $4 billion. Andreessen and
Animoca have already emerged as big beneficiaries of a Bored Apes-related
cryptocurrency, ApeCoin, which debuted last week.
Over the past year, BAYC has become one of
the top NFT collections, with $1.4 billion in lifetime sales, according to data
tracker DappRadar.
Meanwhile Yuga has established itself as
one of the top NFT marketers, striking a deal with Animoca to have the apes
debut in a game and pulling together exclusive events for purchasers of its
digital apes. Ape fans have been putting the digital images to use everywhere
from their social-media profiles to a restaurant.
Yuga plans to use the funds to expand its
development team and for joint ventures and partnerships. It recently bought
the intellectual property -- as well as numerous NFTs -- of the CryptoPunks and
Meebits collections from Larva Labs.
See you on the Otherside in April. Powered by @apecoin pic.twitter.com/1cnSk1CjXS
— Yuga Labs (@yugalabs) March 19, 2022
Yuga may perhaps build the collections into
even bigger brands, with some of the characters debuting in games or on luxury
goods.
Yuga Labs has been financially successful
to date. A leaked pitch deck indicates that the company made $137 million last
year, primarily by taking a cut of the transactions tied to its NFT brands,
with an astounding 95 percent profit margin. (Yuga Labs declined to comment on
figures from the deck.)
But the company has built fairly little at
this point. Its NFT collections have 40,000 users at most, according to
OpenSea’s data, and the company has only released one game for a limited period
of time. That means Yuga Labs is essentially being given hundreds of millions
of dollars to build a gaming company — or at least, the Web3-ified 2022 version
of one — from scratch, off the back of a hugely lucrative art project.
That success is what investors are thinking
about when funding Yuga Labs. “They built this very energized community and
this culture phenomenon,” says Dixon. But the company is ultimately making the
same big bet that so many others are right now: that some format of metaverse
project will become the next explosive thing. Now, they just have to build it
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