Yuga Labs, the US-based creator of non-fungible token (NFT) collection Bored Ape Yacht Club, secured $450m yesterday in a seed round backed by multiple corporates at a post-money valuation of $4bn.
The round included blockchain game developers Animoca Brands and The Sandbox, cryptocurrency exchanges FTX and MoonPay, internet and technology group Alphabet, electronics producer Samsung, metaverse technology developer Genies and sports apparel producer Adidas.
Andreessen Horowitz led the round, which also featured LionTree, Tiger Global Management, SevenSevenSix, Sound Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Digital, Time Ventures, Cobalt Capital, Standard Crypto, Nural/Kinetic, Vaynerfund, SV Angel, Eden Block, Friendly Trading, Thrive Capital, Bond, Hashed, Artist Capital and unnamed others.
Private investors included Mark Cuban and athletes Colin Kaepernick, Shaquille O’Neal and Dez Bryant as well as musicians Snoop Dogg, Gunna, Timbaland, Steve Aoki and 3lau, while FTX, Alphabet and Adidas invested through FTX Ventures, GV and Adidas Ventures respectively.
Founded in 2021, Yuga Labs is the creator of the Bored Ape and Yacht Club collections, made up of static image NFTs each showing an image of an ape with different styles and expressions. The cash will be used to grow its US team and support joint ventures and partnerships.
The company acquired NFT projects CryptoPunks and Meebits from NFT developer Larva Labs earlier this month and released a new token called ApeCoin as it works on a metaverse projects dubbed Otherside.
Yuga Labs chief executive Nicole Muniz said: “Already, a new economy is possible with the [intellectual property] of Apes, Punks and Meebits, owned by the community.
“The possibilities for blockchain’s impact on culture are endless, and so we are building a beautiful, interoperable world for people to explore and play in. There is a lot to come.”
