Ubisoft, Take-Two Back Ethereum NFT Game Maker Horizon in $40M Round

In brief

Horizon, the Web3 startup behind NFT game Skyweaver, just raised a $40 million Series A funding round.
Video game publishers Ubisoft and Take-Two Interactive are among the notable backers.

Major video game publishers Ubisoft and Take-Two Interactive are digging deeper into the NFT gaming space with today’s announcement of a $40 million Series A round raised by Horizon, the developer behind NFT-driven competitive card game, Skyweaver.

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The two firms are among those that participated in the funding round, which was led by Brevan Howard Digital and Morgan Creek Digital. Other backers include Polygon, gaming-centric VC firm Bitkraft, metaverse investor Everyrealm, payments firm Xsolla, and Initialized Capital.

Horizon also attracted some notable individual investors with the round, including Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke, Lolli co-founder and CEO Alex Adelman, and a pair of co-creators from notable NFT games: The Sandbox co-founder and COO Sebastien Borget and Axie Infinity co-founder and Sky Mavis COO Aleksander Larsen.

Skyweaver is a digital trading card game akin to Blizzard’s popular Hearthstone, albeit with the cards represented as Ethereum NFT assets that can be sold and traded—similar to rival NFT game Gods Unchained. An NFT is a blockchain tokenthat represents ownership in a unique item, including digital goods like artwork, collectibles, and video game items.

Horizon’s title first launched in closed alpha testing in 2018, but only released into open beta earlier this year for anyone to play. In addition to publishing the game, Horizon has turned the tech behind it into Sequence, an Ethereum-based development platform and wallet for other creators to tap to create their own Web3 games and apps.

In a post today, Horizon wrote that it will use the $40 million to further push Sequence, as well as continue to enhance and grow Skyweaver. It will also soon launch Niftyswap, a decentralized marketplace focused on Ethereum and Polygon ERC-1155 NFTs—also…

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