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Australian gaming platform closes $200M funding round led by Temasek

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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.

Friend or Foe? Lead Investor Questions VC Funding For Web3 Projects

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Lauren Capelin who works as the lead investor at one of Australia’s biggest startup accelerators raised concerns over traditional venture capital funding for some Web3 startups, warning it might, in reality, hinder rather than help firms build the next-generation tech.

In an interview with a local news outlet, Capelin, a principal at Startmate told that while traditional venture capital funding might benefit some companies in the emerging industry, for others it was potentially “dangerous”. Reading the same, the community strategist noted,

“Part of me questions where and how Web3 projects require traditional investment. That’s not to say they don’t need it, but I wonder what the case is for it when community capitalization options are more available.”

As a matter of fact, several Web3 startups often receive funds through less traditional methods, such as selling their platform’s tokens [like shares with additional utility] to users through a token sale or establishing themselves as a decentralized autonomous organization [DAO].

This is what investor fear

DAOs secure funds by selling tokens to a community of people, who hold individual voting rights over the direction and purpose of the organization. Other DAOs often require members to prove their worth in terms of skills or services they can bring to the table. Many of these DAOs then vote on what proposals or projects are fund-worthy.

With respect to traditional venture capital investments, Capelin worries that Web3 projects would instead suffer as opposed to benefitting.

“I think the dangerous thing is venture capital funding these communities. But there’s definitely space for large-scale investors in capitalizing the core infrastructure of this space [through] more traditional sources of funding,” She added.

Capelin isn’t the first to raise the alarm bells, with Twitter founder Jack Dorsey recently accused leading Web3-friendly large-scale investors such as Andreessen Horowitz of looking to monopolize the space, warning “you don’t own Web3, the VCs and their [limited partners] do.”

Dorsey, one of Bitcoin’s biggest supporters has pointed out the fact that a small number of venture capital firms have managed to grab the majority of the web3 market and called out Andreessen Horowitz, a.k.a a16z, as being at the top of the list.