Axie Infinity Parent Sky Mavis Raises $152M: Why It's Important

One of the most successful non-fungible token projects of all time announced a new funding round Tuesday.

What Happened: Sky Mavis announced a $152-million Series B funding round. The funding was led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). Other investors included Accel, Paradigm, Samsung Next and Seven Seven Six.

Sky Mavis said it will use the funding to build out its global team, scale infrastructure and build a new distribution platform to support game development and blockchain-enabled games.

The company has raised $161 million through the new Series B round and existing investments. Along with the new investors, the company counts Libertus and Mark Cuban as investors.

Sky Mavis is the owner of the popular Axie Infinity NFT game, which recently passed $2 billion in sales volume. Axie Infinity has topped the sales volume chart for four straight weeks for NFTs, according to CryptoSlam.

The company reports it has $33 million in daily transactions and over 2 million daily active users using the game in August. In April, Axie had 38,000 daily active users.

Axie earned $220 million in revenue in September and $342 million in August, according to CoinTelegraph. Messari Capital said Axie had revenue of $782 million in the third quarter, representing more than 48x growth from the second quarter.

Related Link: Top 10 Weekly NFTs By Sales Volume

Why It’s Important: Sky Mavis has been one of the most successful NFT projects to utilize the play-to-earn concept.

“Play-to-earn demonstrates how emerging technologies, such as non-fungible tokens and cryptocurrencies are providing transformative economic opportunities for communities, especially in developing nations where jobs are lacking and COVID-19 crisis relief has been limited,” the company said.

The company reported that 25% of its players are unbanked and 50% had not previously owned or used cryptocurrencies. Axie reports it has players in every country globally, excluding North Korea.

“This level of ownership and accessibility within the Axie economy is upending society and creating an economically viable digital nation.”

The company wants to “cut out the middleman” and continue to build out its own platform for distribution called The Mavis Hub.

“The Mavis Hub distributes games on both PCs and Macs and will seamlessly connect to Sky Mavis’ proprietary Ronin Blockchain, which currently secures over $1.5 billion in assets,” the company said.