Yuga Labs, creators of the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC), announced it has raised USD 450 million from Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto fund at USD 4 billion. The investment round also saw participation from other investors including Animoca Brands, The Sandbox, LionTree, Sound Ventures, Thrive Capital, FTX, and MoonPay in the seed round. According to The Verge, the company plans to use the money to build a media empire around NFTs, starting with games and its own metaverse project.
Nicole Muniz, CEO of Yuga Labs, released a statement: “A new economy is possible with the IP of Apes, Punks, and Meebits, owned by the community.” He further added,
“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’s a lot to come.”
An NFT is a digital asset that uses blockchain technology to record who owns a digital object such as an image, video or in-game item. Bored Apes NFTs are often used as profile pictures on social media. Sales of NFTs reached $25 billion in 2021, compared to just $94.9 million the year before, data from market tracker DappRadar shows.
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The announcement comes just weeks after Yuga Labs acquired the intellectual property (IP) of the CryptoPunks and Meebits collections from Larva Labs. As part of the acquisition, Yuga Labs owns the copyright for both the CryptoPunks and Meebits collections, as well as 423 CryptoPunks and 1711 Meebits. Yuga Labs aims to seed a vibrant new community with the transfer of IP and commercialization rights, teeming with creators and third-party developers to incorporate CryptoPunks and Meebits into digital and physical projects across the world.
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