Dapper Labs Raises $12M From VC Firms and NBA Players, Nets $1.2M in NFT Sales

Dapper Labs, the team behind CryptoKitties and NBA Top Shot, has secured $12 million in the latest investment round for its Flow blockchain.

New investors include Coinbase Ventures, BlockTower Capital, and NBA players Andre Iguodala of Miami Heat, Spencer Dinwiddie and Garrett Temple of the Brooklyn Nets, JaVale McGee of the Los Angeles Lakers, and Aaron Gordon of the Orlando Magic.

Dapper’s chief executive and founder, Roham Gharegozlou, stated that the funding will be used to “ensure that Flow can scale to the size of projects appealing to fan bases as big as the NBA.”

Dapper Labs has now raised approximately $38 million in total.

NBA Top Shot sees early success

Dapper Labs also revealed that it has sold more than $1.2 million worth of crypto-collectibles to hundreds of early adopters on the two-month-old beta version of its NBA Top Shot platform.

The game is Dapper’s flagship title built on the Flow blockchain. Top Shot allows players to purchase non-fungible tokens (NFTs) representing significant "moments" in basketball history. Top Shot has sold more than 22,000 packs of NFTs worth $1.2 million to its roughly 900 active beta users.

The tokens offer multimedia experiences through which fans explore videos and statistics relating to the specific moment that each NFT represents, and offer utility within Top Shot’s corresponding Hardcourt mobile game.

Speaking to Cointelegraph, Gharegozlou emphasized Flow’s capacity to host tokens featuring 3Dl animation, stating that Flow was built “to make sure that any NFT has a chance to be able to access a high-throughput environment, have people build applications for them, [and] scale to billions of users.”  

Blockchain gaming notables raise over $550M combined

Based on data published by blockchaingamer.biz, Dapper's raise would suggest that crypto gaming firms have raised $552 million in total.

The sum comprises $189 million in the form of traditional investments such as venture capital and stock offerings, and $366 million in token sales, initial coin offerings, and other crypto-native fundraising methods.

Last month saw notable recent raises, with fantasy soccer game Sorare raising $4 million in a seed round and blockchain gaming company Animoca Brands receiving $4.1 million from strategic investors — upping the total sum raised by the company to more than $18 million.

DMarket, a decentralized in-game item marketplace, raised $6.5 million in June to bring its lifetime fundraising total to $26 million. The first quarter also saw Horizen Blockchain Games raise $5 million and game developer SuperTree raise $2.5 million.

Crypto gaming is just getting started

Despite the significant sums raised, Animoca Brands’ chief executive Yat Siu told Cointelegraph that the half-billion-dollar milestone is “just the beginning” for blockchain gaming, noting that $4.1 billion was invested in the augmented reality/virtual reality game sector during 2019.

“Gaming today is a $150 billion industry and $500 million invested today is still a small amount,” said Siu. “Given both the potential in games as well as, we believe, the most viable path to mass adoption of blockchain, we think this will only grow more significantly.”