Australian gaming startup Immutable has raised $200-million funds spearheaded by Singapore’s Temasek in a Series C round that is valued at $2.5 billion. According to the firm’s tweet, the funds would help fuel its mission to make NFTs mainstream through high-quality blockchain games. Other investors who took part in the funding exercise include Mirae Asset, ParaFi Capital, Declaration Partners, Tencent Holdings, and others, Immutable said.
Immutable’s co-founder and president, Robbie Ferguson, said, “We’re excited to raise this capital so we can help deploy it aggressively through M&A opportunities,”
The e-sports firm which has its headquarter in Sydney is the developer of NFT games “Gods Unchained”, an online game where trading is done through NFT cards, and “Guild of Guardians”, a mobile game that allows players to earn tradeable rewards.
In February, it announced a partnership with GameStop to launch the videogame retailer’s NFT marketplace alongside a fund worth $100 million dedicated to supporting creators of NFT content from gaming studios, Web3, and metaverse gaming.
Crypto-Gaming boom
The number of blockchain games grew to more than 544 active dApps by the end of 2021, up from about 200 the year before, according to DappRadar. Oscar Franklin Tan, CFO of Enjin, who recently invested in a decentralized accelerator believes that blockchain gaming is the biggest disrupter to the gaming industry.
On March 7, this year, a venture firm called Griffin Partners has raised $750 million focusing to penetrate the broader gaming industry with an eye on Web 3. Nick Tuosto, co-founder and managing director of the firm views that the “enablement of digital asset ownership within games may be the single most important technological unlock in the history of games.”
Coming back to the news, Immutable has built a new scaling solution for NFTs that allows transactions to take place at a much faster rate compared to Ethereum, the second-largest blockchain network. Dubbed as Immutable X, it claims that the protocol requires low computing power and has a smaller environmental impact.
Previously in last September, the Sydney-based start-up had acquired $60 million funds for its platform built on top of Ethereum to monetize NFTs in games.