Sky Mavis Series B: Fueling the Play-to-Earn Revolution
We’ve raised $152 M USD to create economic freedom for gamers.
The funds will fuel the growth and development of Axie Infinity and Ronin, our scaling solution for digital nations.
When Axie was born in February 2018, almost nobody knew what an NFT was, let alone an Axie. Today, NFTs have permeated mainstream culture and Axie is the largest NFT project of all time. Together, with our community that spans every corner of the earth, we’ve started a movement that will redefine the nature of work.
We’ve always believed that NFTs would enable a new type of game that creates economic freedom for its players. We think that there are mostly artificial distinctions between work and play and that anyone who puts their effort and passion into a game deserves to share in its success in a tangible way.
It’s been a dream come true to hear stories of communities transformed, individual lives changed, and players helping each other succeed. Our loyal players have become Axie’s strongest champions with some sporting tattoos, creating esports teams, making educational content, developing tools, and personally onboarding their friends and family.
Our Community is at The Center Of Everything We Do
Axie is the first game designed to be owned by the community that plays it. For far too long game publishers and app stores have held too much power and extracted too much value. The gaming industry needs to change and we will reconstruct it to share value with the most important members of any gaming community: the players.
We believe in:
Rewarding value creation: everyone’s time is valuable. People should always be rewarded for creating value, especially within games.
Co-creation: a game is a creative partnership between its developers and the community that plays and builds value around it.
Co-ownership: your game assets are your property. As a gamer, you deserve property rights and should be able to own the the games you love.
The Future of Work
Have you ever wondered what distinguishes work from play?
Society often talks about work and play as separate, even opposite activities. Gaming is served up by companies as a well-deserved break from a hard day’s effort. Players become customers when they spend their earnings for a chance to play and enjoy themselves. As a result, it’s no surprise that traditional gaming business models are extremely lucrative, one-sided affairs that disproportionately favor the game creators who have sole ownership of the game.
We believe in a future where the lines between work and play are blurred. A future where players and game developers live, work, play, and build together.
Leaving our Mark on History
Together, we’ve broken records and shared monumental moments. Axie is the #1 NFT project of all time by almost any trackable metric:
We’ve grown from 38,000 daily active players in April of this year to over 2 million today! This is all without being on legacy app stores.
$2.2 Bn in volume traded on our proprietary NFT marketplace.
The invention of the scholarship model is redefining the future of work and has created hundreds of thousands of jobs in countries severely impacted by the pandemic.
Over 2 million wallets and 4.5 Bn USD in total value locked on Ronin, our Ethereum sidechain.
Gifted over $100 M of AXS tokens to ~10,000 of our founding community members.
$152M to Fuel the Play-to-Earn Revolution
Today, we’re ecstatic to welcome a world-class group of investors to our amazing community.
This new funding round will allow us to fuel the play-to-earn revolution, bring in incredible talent from across the globe, scale our infrastructure for expected growth, and build our own distribution platforms to support game developers to create NFT-enabled games.
While we’ve scaled at an astonishing rate, adding institutional investors to our community will enable us to expand our reach, reinforce our legitimacy when it comes to regulatory protection, and will give us the flexibility to scale and hire aggressively without touching our AXS token reserves.
"Sky Mavis’ marquee game, Axie Infinity, has introduced a new way for anyone to turn their time into money through Play-to-Earn, a new mechanic that allows gamers to transform their skills and time into earnings and distribution rights for tokenized in-game items. The Axie team has unlocked a new way to build and play games that is already completely redefining this category. The game's growth is a phenomenal testament to how deeply this model is resonating with people around the world. The Axie team has triggered an earthquake in gaming and the industry is now forever changed.”
- Arianna Simpson, Partner, a16z
“As soon as we met Trung, Aleks, and Jiho and immersed ourselves in the Axie Infinity universe, it was clear that Sky Mavis had the power to revolutionize the gaming world as we know it,” said Andrei Brasoveanu, Partner at Accel. “The team is building a category-defining play-to-earn NFT gaming and infrastructure company and we’re thrilled to be partnering with them as they continue to break new, ambitious frontiers!”
- Andrei Brasoveanu, Partner, Accel
The Road Ahead
Relentlessness is a part of our DNA and we will continue to push the boundaries of what’s possible. We aren’t slowing down and this funding round will help us speed up the development of our roadmap.
Axie Infinity: Origin, our upgraded battle system, is getting better every day. It will feature upgraded art, animations, mechanics, and allow people to try Axie for free before buying their own team.
The release of Ronin DEX, a decentralized exchange for trading of in-game tokens (like AXS, SLP) directly on Ronin.
Continued development on Project K, our land-based game that will allow you to harvest resources, build structures, and battle for territory in Lunacia.
Each Axie is a ticket to an ever-expanding collection of experiences. One of our North Stars is to transform Axie into an ecosystem where the majority of the experiences are built by external game studios and our passionate community developers.
Join Us
We’re looking for builders and missionaries to join us in our movement. Check out all of our open spots here.
Questions?