Mark Cuban joins Vietnamese gaming startup Sky Mavis’ $7.5m series A round

Billionaire Mark Cuban and a series of investors have joined Vietnamese gaming startup Sky Mavis’ $7.5m series A round. Sky Mavis is the developer of one of the world’s most popular blockchain games, Axie Infinity.

The round is led by Libertus Capital, a UK-based venture capital firm, which had also co-led a seed round in DeFi (decentralized finance) platform Zapper last August.

The Axie team / Photo credit: Sky Mavis

Other notable investors that participated in the round include 500 Startups, Collab+Currency, DeFi Alliance, CoinGecko Ventures, and game developer and publisher Animoca Brands, which had also led Sky Mavis’ US$1.5 million round in 2019.

Individual investors that joined Cuban were Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit, and John Robinson, president and COO of 100 Thieves, one of the world’s most valuable esports companies.

In a press statement released by Sky Mavis, Cuban said, “I think Axie is an amazing platform. It’s fun and engaging. It’s a game you want to play for hours on end. Add the Axie economy, and you have something special. I’m excited to be part of it.”

Sky Mavis was co-founded in 2018 by Vietnamese developer Trung Nguyen alongside Aleksander Leonard Larsen, Jeffrey Zirlin, Tu Doan and Viet Anh Ho.

Nguyen first got the idea to create Axie Infinity in 2017 after he became fascinated with playing CryptoKitties. Now CEO of Sky Mavis, he had previously served as the chief technical officer for Vietnamese startup Lozi (now LoShip) from 2012 to 2015.

See also: Meet the Vietnamese developer behind blockchain game Axie Infinity 

“Axie Infinity is one of the original non-fungible token (NFT) projects, and we have already been working on NFT before anybody even cared about it,” startup co-founder Zirlin tells Tech in Asia. “It feels very good to see that the world has caught up.”

Axie Infinity allows players to control, feed, breed, and engage with fantasy creatures called Axies in battles. They can also visit a marketplace to buy and sell Axies. NFTs, meanwhile, refer to the unique digital assets that gamers trade on a platform. In the case of Axie Infinity, those would be the Axies themselves and other related items.

The startup says that Axie has become a major NFT gaming ecosystem with over 39,000 daily active users and more than US$12 million in monthly NFT transaction volumes. Data from DappRadar.com shows that NFT trading activity on Axie has totaled nearly US$4.4 million over the past seven days. According to Zirlin, Sky Mavis takes a 4.25% cut from running the Axie ecosystem.

The co-founder says the new US$7.5 million funding, which amounts to 10% of equity, will be used to scale the team aggressively and enhance the technology that can make NFT games such as Axie be more accessible to everyone.

See also: The hunt is still on for Vietnam’s next Flappy Bird