Animoca Brands raises US$20m to accelerate Mocaverse

Animoca Brands has raised US$20m to accelerate its flagship project Mocaverse. The funding round was led by CMCC Global, with other investors including Kingsway Capital, Liberty City Ventures, GameFi Ventures, Aleksander Larsen (founder of Sky Mavis), Gabby Dizon (founder of Yield Guild Games), institutional investors of Koda Capital, amongst others. Yat Siu, the executive chairman and co-founder of Animoca Brands is also participating in the round. 

The new capital will be used to advance the Mocaverse project, including product development, facilitating Web3 adoption, and securing partnerships to expand the gaming, culture and entertainment ecosystem of Animoca Brands’ portfolio of approximately 450 investments in Web3 companies and projects.

The project aims to build Web3-native tooling to empower products in gaming, culture, and entertainment verticals, allowing users to create their own digital identity, accrue reputation, earn and spend loyalty points, and use their digital identity to access the Mocaverse ecosystem, seeded by Animoca Brands' 450+ portfolio companies and partner network with over 700 million addressable users.

As part of the initiative, Mocaverse will also launch Moca ID, a non-transferrable NFT collection designed to enable users to craft their on-chain identities and participate in the Mocaverse ecosystem. 

Moca ID holders will gain exclusive access to Mocaverse ecosystem experiences and will have the unique opportunity to earn loyalty points through active engagement. These loyalty points will power a permissionless and interoperable loyalty system that will be progressively decentralised to enable third-party adoption and integration of Moca ID, with the aim to advance the accessibility and growth of Web3.

Yat Siu, co-founder and executive chairman of Animoca Brands, said: “We are deeply honoured by investors’ support for Animoca Brands and its vision of decentralisation. The ongoing evolution of the Internet involves a shift from hierarchical power structures to autonomous ones, and the DAO-based approach of Mocaverse ensures that its community will be focused on driving innovation and collaboration across the broader Animoca Brands ecosystem.”

In addition to empowering users to participate in a vibrant community that generates new economic opportunities, Mocaverse will also serve as the digital identity, reputation, and loyalty system for other decentralised organisations, Siu said.

As one of the participants of the funding round, Martin Baumann, co-founder of CMCC Global, said: “Having built a long term relationship with Animoca Brands, we are thrilled to be leading this first round of funding into Mocaverse. The project will unify the unique portfolio of companies within the Animoca Brands umbrella and will become a portal for hundreds of millions of new users to access Web3 and metaverse ecosystems.”

At CMCC Global, Baumann said the company looks to support innovative founders that are pushing the boundaries of our industry. “Siu has proved time and again his ability to lead Web3 in creative new directions and we are excited to be supporting him and the Animoca Brands team once again as they venture into the Mocaverse,” he added.

Don’t miss: Animoca Brands invests US$30m in HK-based Web3 super app hi

Back in July, Animoca Brands pumped US$30m in hi, a Hong Kong-based Web3 financial super app and ecosystem. This came as the two companies’ shared the same vision, which is to amplify the utility of fungible tokens and NFTs within the Web3 space.

The partnership is expected to lead to deep integration between Animoca Brands’ ecosystem and hi’s innovative services that are driving Web3 mass adoption. 

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