Welcome back to Chain Reaction. Last week, we talked about the NFT community being down bad but still down to party. This week, we’re looking at the desperation of web3 startups for a post-Apple tech industry. If you want to get this in your inbox every Thursday, you can subscribe on TechCrun…
Cryptoys banks a16z funding to build NFTs for kids
The past several months haven’t been entirely kind to the NFT market — while transaction volume hasn’t stuttered too significantly, the dollar amount invested in the space has been in free fall as cryptocurrency prices have taken a historic dive. With that as background, it might …
Animoca Brands plans to add education to its multibillion-dollar NFT and gaming business
Animoca Brands has grown into one of the biggest firms in the metaverse, play-to-earn gaming, and NFT worlds, but it wants to enter a new sector: education.
Token and equity management startup Sprout raises $3M led by Sequoia
As cryptocurrency goes mainstream, attracting individual and institutional investors, digitally-savvy employers realize tokens are an increasingly attractive form of compensation, especially for their millennial staff. But paying employees in digital assets can create all sorts of administrative hu…
Polygon raises $450M from Sequoia Capital India, SoftBank and Tiger Global
Polygon has raised $450 million in a new venture financing round as the firm, with a market cap of about $13 billion, aggressively expands its portfolio of Ethereum scaling solutions and works to attract the larger developer ecosystem. Sequoia Capital India led Polygon’s first major financing round…
Animoca Brands has raised funding at a more than $5B valuation, triple where it was in October
Animoca Brands, an eight-year-old, 600-person Hong Kong-based outfit that has managed to put its stamp on many of the world’s most popular NFT and metaverse brands, has raised roughly $360 million in fresh funding at a valuation of more than $5 billion, the company announced today. It’s…
Having a great "ask" slide can reassure investors: It shows a founder wants to raise an amount of money that unlocks the next stage of growth and knows what milestones they need to hit to get there.