Brevan Howard Pours $40 Million Into Blockchain Gaming Startup

Horizon Blockchain Games, the creator of popular blockchain game Skyweaver, has raised a $40 million Series A led by Brevan Howard Digital and Morgan Creek Digital.

Other venture capital firms that participated in the round included Take-Two Interactive Software, Polygon, Ubisoft, Xsolla and others. Individual investors including Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke, The Sandbox’s co-founder Sebastien Borget, and Sky Mavis and Axie Infinity co-founder Aleks Larsen also invested in the fundraise.

This latest funding round will be used to scale Sequence, a developer platform and smart wallet designed for Web3 games to expand Skyweaver’s audience and introduce semi-fungible token (SFT) marketplace Niftyswap.

SFTs are an ERC-1155 token that is used in video games and metaverse assets. Horizon plans to soft launch Niftyswap to a group of testers before its public release later this fall. 

As of June 2022, 407,000 Skyweaver accounts had played over 4.8 million matches. The Sequence Wallet is said to have over 675,000 users, according to the company, and is integrated into a boxing NFT marketplace on Polygon from DAZN, a sports entertainment platform.

According to data from DAZN, 80% of its users were exposed to crypto and NFTs through the project for the first time, a fact that Deborah Marfurt, chief financial officer at Horizon, believes to be a great feat.

“The fact that we were significantly oversubscribed in this difficult and bearish market demonstrates the world-class expertise of our team, the excellence of our products, our collective Web3 vision, and the fundamentals of how we’re running this company,” Marfurt said.

Brevan Howard Asset Management has been extremely active in investments in the cryptocurrency space. The hedge fund raised over $1 billion from institutional investors in August and has recently invested in Injective, ​​a layer-1 blockchain network in the Cosmos ecosystem.

Colleen Sullivan, co-head of ventures at Brevan Howard Digital, said in a statement that the Sequence platform “has massive potential to unlock mainstream access for millions of games and applications.”

“We believe Horizon is poised to become the premier platform, wallet, and gaming company of the web3 generation,” Sullivan said.

---

Get the news in your inbox. Explore Blockworks newsletters:

• The Breakdown: Decoding crypto and the markets. Daily.
• Empire: Crypto news and analysis to start your day.
• Forward Guidance: The intersection of crypto, macro and policy.
• 0xResearch: Alpha directly in your inbox.
• Lightspeed: All things Solana.
• The Drop: Apps, games, memes and more.
• Supply Shock: Bitcoin, bitcoin, bitcoin.