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Animoca Brands (Animoca Brands Corporation Ltd) is a Hong Kong-based game software company and venture capital firm. It was founded in 2014 by Yat Siu, and has revenue approximately US $573 Million for the four months ended on 30th April 2022.
The Co-Founder and Chairman of Animoca Brands Corp., Yat Siu, had a talk with Vlad Savov, Bloomberg Tech Editor, on crypto’s 2023. During their conversation, Mr. Siu shared about Animoca’s plans. His firm is looking to raise around $1 Billion this quarter for its new “web3 and metaverse” investment fund. While the firm set its target as much as $2 billion as recently as November.
The fundraising is to invest in blockchain and metaverse startups. But it seems like the firm is “sharply scaling back its ambitions during the current crypto industry meltdown.”
In a Twitter Spaces chat with Bloomberg in Hong Kong on January 5th, 2023, Mr. Siu said “Animoca Capital is in talks with the potential investors. And would use the fund to provide support for blockchain and metaverse startups.”
In addition, the collapse of the FTX exchange in November 2022 shook the entire crypto industry and triggered bankruptcies and shutdowns among various industry players. A dozen of Animoca’s portfolio firms were harshly affected by the FTX collapse, beyond the broader market slow down, as Mr. Siu said. They included NFT spaceship seller Star Atlas, which had much of its treasury sitting on Sam Bankman-Fried’s trading platform, FTX.
Mr. Siu said about Animoca Capital, “Q1 is the goal and then let’s see what happens. It is fair to say it’s a challenging market. But we have quite a bit of interest.” He also mentioned that a shaky market could mean eventually raising slightly lower than the targeted amount.
Last year in November, the Animoca Chief said in a Nikkei interview that his firm is planning to raise up to $2 billion for the new fund, which will be set up in conjunction with former Morgan Stanley exec Homer Sun.
It must be noted that the sudden collapse of FTX somewhere affected the global economy and made the fundraising for crypto industry a bit harder. Still, Mr. Siu is optimistic because a number of subsidiaries of Sequoia-backed Animoca have raised money even through the FTX cycle. However, Mr. Siu did not reveal names or valuations.
Mr. Siu said Animoca Brands is not planning any more fundraising for itself after accepting Temasek’s investment in September. It is keeping its eye on developing an ecosystem of complementary crypto firms building the so-called Web3 — a loosely-defined next iteration of the web with fewer intermediaries and more direct interaction between users and service and content providers.
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