NFT game developer Horizon closes $40M round

Horizon, the developer of NFT trading card game Skyweaver, confirmed a $40 million raise on Tuesday.

The Series A funding round was led by Brevan Howard Digital and Morgan Creek Digital, with participation from video game publishers Ubisoft and Take-Two Interactive. Other investors included Polygon, gaming-centric VC firm Bitkraft, metaverse investor Everyrealm, payments firm Xsolla, and Initialized Capital.

The round also drew the interest of some notable individual investors like Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke, Lolli co-founder, and CEO Alex Adelman, alongside a pair of co-creators from leading NFT games – The Sandbox co-founder and COO Sebastien Borget and Axie Infinity co-founder Aleksander Larsen.

Skyweaver is a digital trading card game. The cards, represented as Ethereum NFT assets, can be traded just like the rival NFT game Gods Unchained.

Horizon’s title was first unveiled in a closed alpha test in 2018. The open beta was only released earlier this year. The company eventually turned the tech behind the game into Sequence, an Ethereum-based development platform and wallet for other creators who want to create their own Web3 games and apps.

Meanwhile, Horizon disclosed in a recent post that it would use the $40 million to further push Sequence, as well as continue to bolster its Skyweaver efforts. The firm will also roll out Niftyswap, a decentralized marketplace focused on Ethereum and Polygon ERC-1155 NFTs used for games and collectibles.

Prior to the latest funding round, Horizon had raised $13.3 million in seed funding, including a $5 million tranche in 2020 led by its now-departed co-founder, Alexis Ohanian.

The Reddit co-founder has always advocated for Skyweaver and NFT gaming, recently saying that it was a “non-obvious investment” at the time the project was undertaken.

Ubisoft and Take-Two Interactive are two of the largest video game publishers in the industry. Both boast of massive franchises and have made previous moves into the Web3 space.

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