Axie Infinity developer raises $152m from a16z, others

Vietnam’s Sky Mavis, the company behind gaming craze Axie Infinity, has raised US$152 million in a series B round that saw participation from Andreessen Horowitz (a16z).

While the company did not disclose its valuation, two people with knowledge of the matter told The Information that the amount would be around US$3 billion.

Sky Mavis co-founders Jeff, Andy, Trung, Tu, and Aleks / Photo credit: Sky Mavis

Sky Mavis said the round comes as Axie Infinity’s daily active players hit over 2 million. The company also said that volume traded on its proprietary NFT marketplace has reached a value of US$2.2 billion.

It plans to use the new capital to bring in more talent, scale its infrastructure for expected growth, and help game developers create NFT-enabled games.

Sky Mavis also shared that it plans to accelerate the development of its product roadmap. This includes an upgraded battle system for Axie, the release of a dedicated exchange for in-game tokens on its sidechain Ronin, continued development on its land-based game Project K, and the transformation of Axie into an ecosystem that involves participation from external game studios.

“While we’ve scaled at an astonishing rate, adding institutional investors to our community will enable us to expand our reach, reinforce our legitimacy when it comes to regulatory protection, and will give us the flexibility to scale and hire aggressively without touching our AXS token reserves,” the company said in its statement.

Amid Axie Infinity’s rise in popularity, however, its players are starting to see lower daily earnings – prices of its in-game currency, small love potions or SLP, fell to roughly US$0.06 at the end of September from US$0.35 in mid-July. To help with this, Sky Mavis recently released plans to change up its axie breeding costs.

See Also: Axie Infinity faces big test as player earnings fall

The investment is Andreessen Horowitz’s latest in the cryptocurrency space, after backing Yield Guild Games earlier this year.