Participated · Seed · Nov 2024

Party Icons centers on Miragio, a customizable interactive island that serves as the Partyverse hub and gateway to three playable modes—Party Heist, Party Brawl, and Carnival Clash—with more modes planned. The platform blends traditional Web2 game design with Web3 features: mintable higher-rarity Hero Icons and weapons, Mirship NFTs, and a Party-as-a-Service (PaaS) live-ops model that decentralizes economic and operational control to guilds, streamers, and players. A secret fourth mode, God Mode, is reserved for OGX̅ NFT holders and enables game-master mechanics; a spectator role that lets viewers influence live streams is slated for rollout and testing in 2025. Sessions are built for ‘bite-sized’ play (most under 12 minutes) and the game emphasizes social and competitive experiences with upgradeable Party Talents, weapons, and player-driven clubs. The company says it will use new funding to accelerate development of gaming and social experiences, expand Web3-enabled functionality and infrastructure, and fuel global expansion into key markets in 2025. Total known funding is now $20 million.

Participated · Seed · Oct 2024

Darkbright Studios is building next-generation accessible midcore games, beginning with Smolbound, a life-sim RPG that blends cozy simulation, hero-collection RPG elements, and robust UGC. The studio emphasizes extensive live ops and a player-driven creation economy enabled by seamless web3 integration and on-chain content ownership. Smolbound’s IP stems from Smol Brains (a CC0 community-created IP) and will launch on the Treasure Layer-2 blockchain in 2025, with closed playtests underway in 2024. The team was incubated by Treasure DAO and is composed of industry veterans from PopCap, ArenaNet, Phoenix Labs, Big Fish Games, and Bain & Co, whose prior titles have generated over $3 billion in game revenues. Darkbright reports strong early traction for Smolbound, including 1.8+ million trailer views, 200K+ email signups, and 70K+ Discord users within a month of the trailer launch. The studio plans to leverage its community-rooted IP, live service expertise, and web3 foundations to scale the game and its UGC ecosystem.

Participated · Seed · May 2024

PlayAI is a Web3 game services provider that rewards players for sharing their game data. The company uses collected game data to train AI models. PlayAI launched Collective, a platform where users can share game data and monetize it. The article reports PlayAI completed a $4.3M seed financing at a $70M valuation. Named supporters include P2 Ventures, Jump Crypto, Alphawave, Zentry, MH Ventures, Tykhe Block Ventures and angel investors. No operating metrics or detailed future plans beyond the Collective platform were disclosed in the article.

Participated · Seed · Jul 2022

On Jul 26, 2022 reNFT raised $5 million in a seed funding round. The financing was supported by a broad group of investors including Everyrealm, Inception Capital, OpenSea, Longhash Ventures, Zentry, MetaStreet, The Sandbox, Animoca Ventures, Gemini Frontier Fund, Sfermion, emoote, Morningstar Ventures, SkyVision Capital, Fourth Revolution Capital, Mechanism Capital, Lattice, Daedalus Angel Syndicate, Moonfire Ventures, gumi Cryptos, and others. The article provides investor descriptions that highlight metaverse, NFT, and crypto-focused participants — Everyrealm is described as leaders in metaverse and NFT innovation, OpenSea as the largest marketplace for crypto collectibles, and The Sandbox as a user-generated voxels video game based on Ethereum. Other backers listed include venture firms, specialized crypto funds, and an angel syndicate. The article does not include additional operational metrics, product details, prior financings, founding year, or location information. reNFT is a year-old decentralized autonomous organization that runs an Ethereum mainnet protocol for renting NFTs. Its platform lets lenders send NFTs to a smart contract, set daily rental prices and maximum rental periods, while borrowers pay rental fees plus collateral returned on return of the asset. The protocol supports ERC-721 and ERC-1155 tokens and has been used to rent collections such as Stoner Cats and Animetas to grant temporary access to perks. ReNFT positions itself as a way for owners to monetize community and utility benefits without selling underlying NFTs. The team is working on expanding compatibility to Solana and Polygon and sees future use cases in the metaverse for renting play-to-earn items, IP and digital real estate. The company recently raised external capital in a seed round led by Animoca Brands.