Todd Spangler NY Digital EditorYuga Labs, the company that created the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT collection, has raised $450 million in funding that gives it a post-money valuation of $4 billion, the company announced.The round was led by venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz’s a16z crypto fund.
Other investors joining the round included game studio Animoca Brands and its subsidiary The Sandbox; investment firms LionTree, Sound Ventures and Thrive Capital; and crypto players FTX and MoonPay.The company said it will use the funds to “scale its rapidly growing team, attract the best talent across creative, engineering and operations functions, and for joint ventures and partnerships it has planned.” On Friday, the company teased a new metaverse project, dubbed Otherside, designed to integrate avatars from other NFT projects.
The funding news comes less than two weeks after Yuga Labs announced that it acquired the intellectual property of NFT pioneer CryptoPunks and Meebits from Larva Labs.
Last week, the company launched ApeCoin, a cryptocurrency that Yuga says will be governed independently as a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO).
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