Yuga Labs Raised $450M And Is Now Valued At $4 Billion

Yuga Labs raised $450 million and is now valued at $4 billion and the funds will go towards building out the new NFT metaverse “Otherside” so let’s read more today in our latest cryptocurrency news today.

Yuga Labs raised $450 million in a new fundraise and is now valued at $4 billion and the owners of the NFT collections announced the completion that will help them develop its NFT metaverse project. The news of the raise emerged in the company’s press release which revealed a16z as the leader of the round. Andreesen Horowitz became deeply involved with investing in everything related to web3 and seems to have followed through on the BAYC proposed investment deal too.

The investment leader is joined by the Metaverse game The Sandbox and exchanges FTX and MoonPay among others. Together, the funds will scale Yuga’s team and will support the joint ventures and partnerships which it has planned. Yuga owns the property for BAYC, Meebits, and CryptoPunks the two being the most highly evaluated collections on the market. They have a market cap of 1,060,611.52 ETH and 716,147.28 ETH. The Metaverse project the company is pursuing is called Otherside which will be an interoperable world connecting to the NFT universe. The Yuga Labs co-founder Greg Solano believes that the game will stand out from other projects which are less competitive:

“You only play with people and make friends because you’re getting your ass kicked. Basically, we don’t think deep social experience comes from essentially a Zoom chat and walking around saying ‘hi.’”

Despite the excitement around NFTs, the ETH founder Vitalik Buterin is not a fan of BAYC and he said:

 “The peril is you have these $3 million monkeys and it becomes a different kind of gambling.”

As recently reported, BAYC’s Yuga Labs is the company behind the biggest NFT collections in the industry and it announced today that it purchases the rights to the intellectual property of the Meebits and CryptoPunks collections from Larva Labs.  Yuga Labs launched the BAYC collection back in 2021 and granted all Bored Ape NFT owners full licnese to use the image their own for commercial use of their choice. Brands, celebrities, and entrepreneurs capitalized on the BAYC phenomenon and launched various Bored Ape-branded enterprises like the Arizona Iced Tea ad campaign and a Gorillaz-inspired metaverse band from Universal Music Group.