Investment firm KKR to up Animoca Brands’ newest funding to $500 million: report

Venture Capital • February 9, 2022, 4:53PM EST
UPDATED: February 11, 2022, 9:48AM EST
The Block

KKR & Co, a global investment firm based in the United States, is in talks to increase Animoca Brands’ latest funding round to $500 million, Bloomberg reports with anonymous sources familiar with the transaction. 

Animoca Brands had just come off the heels of a $358.88 million funding round on January 18, led by Liberty City Ventures and with participation from George Soros and the Winklevoss twins. The Hong Kong-based gaming and venture capital firm’s valuation still stands at $5 billion — but could soon be valued at $10 billion through additional funding rounds this year, Bloomberg’s sources report. 

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KKR recently invested in other blockchain companies, such as giving $350 million to the crypto custodian Anchorage Digital in December of 2021. 

Animoca Brands is the creator behind blockchain-based gaming products such as the popular virtual world platform The Sandbox. The firm is also responsible for bringing forth Olympic Games Jam: Beijing 2022, a blockchain-based game inspired by the Olympics, through its subsidiary nWay.

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MK Manoylov has been a reporter for The Block since 2020 — joining just before bitcoin surpassed $20,000 for the first time. Since then, MK has written nearly 1,000 articles for the publication, covering any and all crypto news but with a penchant toward NFT, metaverse, web3 gaming, funding, crime, hack and crypto ecosystem stories. MK holds a graduate degree from New York University's Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program (SHERP) and has also covered health topics for WebMD and Insider. You can follow MK on X @MManoylov and on LinkedIn.