The Sandbox team
Singapore-based True Global Ventures has invested US$10 million in The Sandbox, an open NFT metaverse platform.
The Sandbox, owned by global game developer Animoca Brands, has raised a total of US$93 million in this Series B round.
SoftBank Vision Fund 2 led this round, marking its maiden investment into crypto assets. Animoca Brands, SCB 10X, Liberty City Ventures, Galaxy Interactive, Kingsway Capital, LG Technology Ventures, Polygon Studios, and Samsung Next co-invested.
True Global Ventures invested in The Sandbox through its blockchain fund TGV 4 Plus, which was launched in 2019 and hit the final close at US$100 million this September.
The Sandbox will utilise the funding to strengthen its platform as an entertainment destination where businesses, intellectual properties, and celebrities can interact with their followers through virtual experiences such as games, live events, and social media.
The firm claims to have partnered with major IPs and brands, including Snoop Dogg, The Walking Dead, deadmau5, Atari, Rollercoaster Tycoon, Care Bears, The Smurfs, Shaun the Sheep, and Binance.
Also read: Next blockchain unicorn will be from gaming: Dusan Stojanovic of True Global Ventures
Launched in 2012 by serial entrepreneurs Arthur Madrid (CEO) and Sebastien Borget (COO), The Sandbox started as a 2D metaverse game with more than 40 million players worldwide. Following Animoca Brands’s acquisition in 2018, it developed a metaverse built on the Ethereum blockchain. It offers players and creators a decentralised and intuitive platform to create immersive 3D worlds and game experiences and safely store, trade, and monetise their creations.
True Global Ventures has been a shareholder of The Sandbox since its US$2 million funding round in 2019. It also has a stake in Animoca Brands, a global “play-to-earn” blockchain gaming and NFTs developer.
“We believe that the prominent unicorns in the blockchain sector will be coming from the gaming blockchain area in the short term,” founder Dusan Stojanovic said in an earlier interview with e27. “Later on, companies linked to renewable energy will have a significant impact.”
Licensed by the Monetary Authorities of Singapore, True Global Ventures is a distributed ledger technology equity fund launched in 2010 by serial entrepreneurs-turned-investors. It targets blockchain startups operating in entertainment, infrastructure, financial services, data analytics, and artificial intelligence (AI), focusing on late-stage Series B and C companies.
Upon the closing of its US$100 million fund, TGV said it would invest in around another 10-20 companies with cheque sizes ranging from US$3 million to US$10 million.
In addition, True Global Ventures offers its portfolio startups with follow-on investments with its network of over 80 investment partners, including seasoned general partners of VCs, business angels, institutional investors, top corporate executives, and family offices.
The venture capital firm now has a presence in 20 cities, including Singapore, Hong Kong, Taipei, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Moscow, Stockholm, Paris, Warsaw, New York, San Francisco, and Vancouver.
As noted in TGV’s vision statement, the fund believes that multi-metaverse systems based on Blockchain and NFTs would provide true digital ownership of digital assets while also promoting interoperability, open standards, and transparency.
“These metaverses will have new types of distributed governance, where both large corporations and smaller communities will exist side by side more equitably,” the firm stated. “Many of these communities will be owned by the communities and creators themselves.”
Besides, the firm underlined that innovations in this space would drive Web 3.0 adoption and bring these technologies to the masses for positive change.
“We believe that positive virtual worlds, e.g., open, transparent, sustainable, will positively impact the real world.”
Besides The Sandbox and Animoca Brands, the TGV 4 Plus fund has made investments in three other firms, including Forge Global, a global market firm in secondary private markets; Canada Computational Unlimited, a Bitcoin mining company powered entirely by renewable energy; and QuantumRock, an artificial intelligence asset management platform.
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Image Credit: The Sandbox
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