Battlebound Secures $4.8M Seed Round + $3M in NFT Sales

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I started Battlebound in May 2021 after spending 4 years creating game art and scalable pipelines for League of Legends and Teamfight Tactics. I left Riot Games instilled with a passionate belief that video games have the unique potential for players to experience thrilling moments that meaningfully enrich their lives. We call these moments heroic stories, and they are the cornerstone for the games we’re building at Battlebound.

Our mission is to build memorable lifelong gaming communities that invite players into heroic stories, creating deep connections and positive life changes. Our games are meant to be played with friends and offer players genuine ownership, utility, and composability over their well-deserved game assets. We believe NFTs and blockchain technology empowers us to connect with our players more deeply and share the value generated by people playing games they love.

After leading our founding team out of League of Legends and Teamfight Tactics, at Riot Games, we’ve expanded our team’s AAA development experience with developers from Blizzard, Ubisoft, and NCSoft.  As we continue to build at the intersection of play-to-earn and world-class gameplay, we’re actively hiring talented individuals to join us on our mission.

Our vision is to create top-tier AAA game experiences that give traditional players the ability to opt-in to the world of on-chain gaming. Players will play and enjoy our games because they offer best-in-genre gameplay. Our play-to-earn model will enhance an already superb gaming experience by providing a heightened level of ownership in the games players play a pivotal role in building.

Battlebound is currently developing two titles. The first is Evaverse which is available to play on PC, Mac, and eventually mobile. It is a web3 multiplayer video game evolving into a digital metaverse where players can socialize, play competitively, and collect NFTs. Last year, we launched an NFT collection of 10K playable game avatars called First Arrivals, which generated $3M in funding from thousands of passionate players around the world.  We’ve now grown the Evaverse discord community to over 7K members and airdropped three other NFT collections to our community. We will be launching a Second Arrivals collection and an Evaverse token later this year. Join our Evaverse discord to stay in touch.

Evaverse is Battlebound’s metaverse and an open platform for other NFT communities and IPs that otherwise couldn’t build a metaverse with strong and consistent game dynamics. We’ve partnered with several notable NFT collections to integrate playable avatars for their respective communities and will continue to partner with projects as well as facilitate open integrations as the Evaverse expands.

Project A, our second game, is a next-gen creature collecting adventure for friends to discover, battle, and own. Project A offers players a more curated gaming experience with unique interoperability opportunities between all of Battlebound’s titles.

At Battlebound, we build games for players. These passionate communities pour their time and resources into their favorite games but historically have not seen nearly enough value and ownership to reflect their efforts spent furthering the games ecosystem. Battlebound aims to revolutionize how developers and players share in the rewards of the games they play a pivotal role in building.

We’re also noticing interesting parallels between the emergence of free-to-play and web3 games. Free-to-play was initially met with similar doubts and misunderstandings that web3 games face. We believe the best versions of play-to-earn games are still being developed. When the player ownership model is optimized for long-term community value, players can participate in the ecosystem of their favorite games like never before.

As we continue our game development and hiring process, we decided to raise capital to facilitate growth and sustainably accelerate product development. We wanted partners that share our community values, believe in the direction of our games and the games industry’s future. 

We are excited to announce that we closed our $4.8M seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), with Play Ventures and Dapper Labs participating. In addition, we have an amazing list of angel investors including Kristian Segerstrale (CEO of Super Evil Mega Corp), Ryan Wyatt (CEO of Polygon Studios), Gabby Dizon (CEO of Yield Guild Games), Roham Gharegozlou (CEO of Dapper Labs), Alex Price (a16z Advisor), Raaid Hossain (Partner at Tribe Capital), Thomas Vu (Web3 Investor), and Kenny Carvalho (Game Industry Recruiter). We thank everyone for their invaluable guidance and support. 

This funding will allow us to scale up and release our titles in phases while being quicker to market, de-risking development, and iterating as we grow alongside our players.

Battlebound is a remote-first studio but will eventually open a physical headquarters for developers who prefer to work together in person. If you’re passionate about forging this new frontier and building the future of play-to-earn games, please check out our job board. 

We look forward to meeting you.