Chased by Soros and Sequoia for $360 million, how did Animoca Brands become a unicorn on the NFT track?
Original Source: MetaverseHub
Original Source: MetaverseHub
From 2021 to 2022, the upsurge of NFT and Metaverse can be said to be unsettled and wave after wave. The number of registered users of the blockchain sandbox game The Sandbox has just exceeded 2 million.
Metaverse game Decentraland will host the first Metaverse Fashion Week; Dapper Labs is shortlisted for the world's most innovative company in 2022...
The strength of each company is comparable, but in fact the biggest winner of this competition may still be Animoca Brands. In addition to the above-mentioned star projects, the company has invested more than 150 NFT or Metaverse-related projects.
On January 19, 2022, Animoca Brands completed a new round of financing with an amount of up to US$359 million, led by Liberty City Ventures.
In addition, other participating investors include Red Shirt China, Soros Fund Management, Gemini Frontier Fund, Winklevoss Capital and 10T Holdings.According to sources, there are as many as 19 participating institutions whose identities are disclosed in this investment, and there are also some undisclosed investors. Not only that,
The round more than doubled Animoca Brands' valuation to more than $5 billion.
In October of the same year, the valuation reached 2.2 billion U.S. dollars, and then to the current 5 billion U.S. dollars, gradually becoming a unicorn company on the NFT track. How did Animoca Brands do it? What is it that has been favored by many investment institutions?
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Who is Animoca Brands?
Animoca Brands is actually a subsidiary spun off from Animoca. It is a blockchain game development and investment company founded in 2014 by the famous Hong Kong technology entrepreneur Yat Siu, headquartered in Hong Kong.
Xiao Yi, who was born in Vienna, Austria, has had a strong interest in code and programming since he was a teenager. With a musical family background, he is better at making music with computer software.
Because his father is from Hong Kong, Xiao Yi returned to Hong Kong around the age of 18 and started his entrepreneurial career since then.
In 2009, Xiao Yi sold the network service company he founded, Outblaze, to IBM. The emerging mobile Internet at that time attracted Xiao Yi's attention, and he began to research APPs and create games.
It can be said that this year was a watershed in Xiao Yi's entrepreneurial and investment career, and it also planted the seeds for later focusing on the blockchain and game fields.
Animoca Brands is not only the developer of Metaverse head project The Sandbox and the NFT racing game F1 Delta Time, but also an early investor in star projects such as Dapper Labs and Decentraland.
At the same time, Animoca Brands also owns the development and agency rights of big IP manga mobile games such as Doraemon, Chibi Maruko, and Marvel.
In 2012, Animoca was only a mobile game company with traditional mobile game development as its core business, and it was also one of the largest mobile game companies in Asia.
At the time Animoca had more than 40 million installs and $20 million in annual revenue. However, because Apple didn't like the way Animoca cross-promoted the company's apps, it canceled Animoca's platform.
In 2015, Animoca Brands listed on the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX), but its performance has been unsatisfactory, and it has even expanded its business into the field of e-books.In the fourth quarter of 2017, Animoca Brands' quarterly cash flow has been negative,
Under such circumstances, the company had to make a series of adjustments to internal salaries, personnel, assets, etc. to streamline costs and increase revenue.
The turning point for Animoca Brands came at the end of 2017. Animoca Brands was acquiring a studio called Fuel Powered, and Axiom Zen, which is developing CryptoKitties, shared an office with it.
The founder, Yat Siu, became very interested in this blockchain game CryptoKitties. In November 2017, Crypto Kitties was launched, which quickly ignited the market.
In early 2018, Animoca entered into a renewable one-year exclusive licensing and distribution agreement with Axiom Zen for the release of "CryptoKitties"."This is the first time we have participated in blockchain games and NFT, and we immediately realized the power and benefits of this, and how NFT will revolutionize the existing game industry by providing players with digital property rights"
But precisely because Animoca Brands involved in the Crypto field, some "transaction violations" occurred. Under the continuous inquiries of the ASX, it had to choose to delist. The field has more room for development.
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How Animoca Brands ushered in the second spring?Opportunities are not lacking for many people, what is lacking is the ability to seize opportunities.
When Animoca acquired Fuel Powered, it came into contact with CryptoKitties, the first blockchain game, and this seemed to be a tailor-made opportunity for Animoca.
For Animoca Brands, which is already making games, understanding how Crypto and NFT will change the game and what kind of new prosperity it will bring to the game industry can be said to be effortless.
Therefore, Animoca quickly won the exclusive authorization and distribution rights of Crypto Kitties, and directly experienced the grand occasion that games based on blockchain technology will bring.
Subsequently, Animoca started to explore the blockchain industry, and began to cast the net everywhere in the blockchain game field to capture the future development dividends in this direction.
Although at that time, blockchain games were not brilliant, and there were no consumer-level applications. For most people in the blockchain industry, blockchain games are promising, but how to develop them has not yet been established. Clear thinking, there are still many unknowns.
However, with its own professional advantages, Animoca Brands has started to invest and deploy in the field of blockchain games based on its own understanding in 2018. There are many investment and acquisition projects, but it seems that there are not many projects that can really shine in the end.
However, Animoca Brands has also accurately won most of the high-quality projects in the blockchain game field.
In August 2018, Animoca acquired Pixowl, the development company of the sandbox mobile game "The Sandbox" with 1 million monthly active users, for US$4.875 million. At that time, Pixowl was planning to launch its blockchain version, so there was Now many celebrities and famous companies have set foot in the blockchain version of "The Sandbox".
Players can buy land on The Sandbox, and build the game they want on their own site, a bit like the blockchain version of "Minecraft".
In October 2018, Animoca invested $500,000 in Decentraland's seed round.
Decentraland is a virtual world that wants to create a "Matrix" based on blockchain and VR technology. Users can build their own virtual real estate by building the buildings they want on it.
Both have a similar logic of virtual land + construction, and in March 2021, a company named Roblox was successfully listed in the United States for the first time with the concept of metaverse, we only understand when we look back Both Decentraland and The Sandbox belong to the metaverse in the blockchain.
And in October 2021, Facebook, the world's largest social platform, announced its full entry into the Metaverse and renamed it Meta. Since then, the concept of Metaverse has really attracted the attention of the whole world.
Having previously worked with Dapper Labs, the team behind CryptoKitties, Animoca subsequently participated in multiple rounds of Dapper Labs' $12 million in November 2018, $11.2 million in September 2019, and $11.4 million in August 2020. financing.And Dapper Labs is also a team that has created miracles in the field of blockchain games many times.
After Animoca's investment, Dapper Labs successively launched the high-performance blockchain Flow Network, the only consumer-oriented application, and NBA Top Shot, an NBA digital collection project launched in cooperation with NBA officials.
Among them, because NBA Top Shot can quickly convert traditional star card players into users, the number of users has exceeded one million in a very short period of time, and the monthly revenue has also exceeded US$100 million.
The rapid success of NBA Top Shot directly allowed the Dapper Labs team to obtain more than US$500 million in financing in just 6 months, and Animoca Brands once again caught up with this express train.
On the other hand, as the application of NFT began to improve in 2019, Animoca Brands quickly followed the hot spots and invested in OpenSea, the largest NFT trading market, in November 2019.
Therefore, when we look back at Animoca Brands delisted from the ASX, they did not escape from a mainstream melody, but instead found the next Holy Grail and chose to bet on it, which is why we saw Animoca Brands ushered in Their "second spring".
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Why is Animoca Brands betting on blockchain?
But what really made Animoca Brands make up its mind to transform into the blockchain and metaverse lies in some changes in the market and its own role, which we will discuss below.
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NFT and chain games are ushering in an explosion
According to statistics in our previous annual report, the total value of the NFT market has jumped from US$41 million in 2018 to US$23 billion in 2021, and even this growth trend has not stopped this year. In the first quarter of 2022 The unfinished transaction volume has exceeded 20 billion U.S. dollars, and it seems that it has surpassed the market size of the past year in the first three months.
In the layout of Animoca Brands, we will find that 2018 is an important year for its transformation. In this year, they acquired The Sandbox development company Pixowl, which is preparing to transform blockchain games, for $4.875 million.
In the same year, Animoca Brands invested in Decentraland and Dapper Labs successively, although at that time these investments or acquisitions did not bring much revenue to it, and were even in a loss stage.
But Yat Siu, the co-founder of Animoca Brands, has already spotted this track, so at the end of 2019, he made another shot at the end of 2019 and led the $1.465 million financing of AxieInfinity developer Sky Mavis with $420,000.The subsequent story, as we have described in detail above,
With the explosion of the NFT market and the blockchain game market, several companies that it bet on have become leaders in the industry. It can be said that Yat Siu has undoubtedly become a "golden player" on the road of looking at the direction. ".
Taking a step back, they are both promoters and beneficiaries of heroes created by the times.
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Become a blockchain investment institution
When we look back at the development of the blockchain industry in the past few years, we can always find some stories of investment companies growing from nothing to "investment giants".
Whether it is Paradigm, which has been famous for a long time, or VCHashed, the first encryption in Korea due to its expansion from 700,000 to 4 billion US dollars recently, the protagonists of the story seem to have become "bull devils" through experience in Crypto.
And now, we see that Animoca Brands accepts "Old Money" from traditional mainstream investment institutions on the one hand, and invests these "Old Money" in the blockchain field on the other hand, which covers NFT, blockchain According to data from the official website of Animoca Brands, it has involved more than 150 investment projects so far.
At the same time, according to a company investment data released by Animoca Brands co-founder Yat Siu at the end of last year, the investment and digital asset revenue of Animoca Brands in the first three quarters of 2021 will increase to about 529.6 million US dollars, holding more than 600 million US dollars liquid digital assets.Therefore, we can see that since I came into contact with CryptoKitties in 2018 and tasted the sweetness of many investment successes afterwards,
Animoca Brands has gradually transformed from a game development company to an investment company.
It can also be regarded as completing the role transfer from "Party B" to "Party A", except that his LP (group of sources of funds) is other traditional giants.
And Yat Siu just made a choice that conforms to the interests of the majority of people, even if it is forced to delist, but looking at it now, is listing still important to Yat Siu? Maybe it's not the only way.
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The founding team sees an even further future: the Metaverse
As early as last year, Yat Siu, co-founder and chairman of Animoca Brands, said in an interview, "For me, this is the great prospect of an open metaverse, that is, in terms of innovation, creativity and creation of new things, we can Build the exact same way of life as in the physical world. Because I happen to own 'these', their ownership is secure and verified."
We can see that Animoca Brands is targeting not only NFT or blockchain, but also the Metaverse led by Web3.In front of this grand story,
Animoca Brands saw both opportunities and how to move towards that "metaverse" step by step.
In a recent interview, Yat Siu once again reiterated his views on the ideal metaverse, he said, "If in the end, most of us decide to live in a closed metaverse or a completely closed ecosystem , then in fact our life is to follow their rules.
And it's going to be harder for us to break through that because they end up manipulating and controlling this network effect like we're seeing with some of the big tech companies today. "Perhaps this is why Animoca Brands has invested in so many multiverse-related companies, because
NFT is a new asset structure in the Web3 framework, "earning while playing" is the game state in the Web3 state, and decentralized finance is the underlying foundation of the Metaverse.
However, YatSiu has given more meaning to the current development of Animoca Brands, which is not only the context of the times, but also the yearning of everyone.
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Can Animoca Brands' success be replicated?
When we review the history of Animoca Brands from the game development team to the listing, and then delist All in and enter the blockchain industry, we, as researchers, will ask a question: Can the success of Animoca Brands be replicated?First of all, the biggest inspiration that Animoca Brands brings us is that even a listed company cannot stop exploring
, especially in this rapidly changing world, if you just regard the company's listing as the end point of the company, it may eventually become a joke of listed companies, especially when we look at the bottom of the listed companies now, the stock price has been falling all the way , Shareholders have complained all the way, and shareholders have been reducing their holdings.
In contrast, the founder of Animoca Brands stood up decisively when the team encountered a growth bottleneck and chose to open up a new growth path, which led to the discovery of NFT and Play-to-Earn, and embarked on the journey of building metaverse and The road to Web3.So, in this sense, any company can copy this spirit,
But going back to Animoca Brands itself, if you want to create another "Animoca Brands", maybe in addition to the openness of your mind, you need the torrent of the times.
If there is no rise of the NFT market, no blockchain games from cold winter to excitement, and no sudden explosion of metaverse, Animoca Brands' bet will only fall into the abyss.
Therefore, it may be a good question to ask, where is the growth point of the next track? Do you want to bet?
