Yuga Labs Raises $450M at $4B Valuation

Yuga Labs, the company behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club, has reached a $4 billion valuation via a $450 million raise that was led by the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz.

Metaverse Funding

Rumors about Yuga Labs’ potential raise have proven to be true.  

Per a Verge report, the team behind the blue-chip Bored Ape Yacht Club and Mutant Ape Yacht Club NFT collections, Yuga Labs, has raised $450 million at a $4 billion valuation. The Yuga Labs team said the money would go, in part, toward the Metaverse project it has in the works, Otherside.

Andreessen Horowitz, which has also invested in OpenSea, Dapper Labs, and Coinbase, led the round. One of Andreessen Horowitz’s general partners, Chris Lyons, will be granted a seat on Yuga Labs’ board. 

The leader of Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto arm, Chris Dixon, said, 

“To me, Yuga Labs, combined with these other emerging [Web3] companies, are an important counterweight to companies like Meta. There’s a dystopian future where Meta is this kind of dominant digital experience provider, and all the money and control goes to that company.” 

Animoca Brands, Coinbase, and MoonPay also participated in the funding.

The Metaverse gaming project that Yuga Labs has in the works is an MMORPG. The team seems to hope to incorporate fundamental Web3 principles into the game, such as interoperability and decentralization. Wylie Aronow, a co-founder of Bored Ape Yacht Club, opined, “We think the real Ready Player One experience will be player run.” 

Yuga Labs has made major moves recently. On Mar. 12, the company acquired the intellectual property rights to Larva Labs’ classic NFT collection CryptoPunks, as well as Meebits. Only days later, ApeCoin DAO launched ApeCoin, which swelled to a $15 billion valuation, higher than The Sandbox, Polygon, and Aave. 

Disclosure: At the time of writing, the author of this piece owned BTC, ETH, and several other cryptocurrencies.