Quick take:
- Other investors include Makers Fund, Hashed, Collab+Currency, Sfermion, Mirana Ventures, Bitscale Capital and Mantle EcoFund.
- NPC Labs is a project of three former Coinbase employees CEO Daryl Xu, Viktoriya Hying and Sean Geng.
- The trio are building B3.fun an on-chain scaling gaming ecosystem built on Base.
NPC Labs, a Web3 gaming startup co-founded by three former Coinabse employees has raised $21 million across two rounds. Founded in April this year by CEO Daryl Xu, Viktoriya Hying and Sean Geng, NPC Labs secured $18 million in a seed round led by Pantera Capital. The Block reported that the company had also raised another $3 million in a pre-seed round.
Other inventors joining the rounds include Makers Fund, Hashed, Collab+Currency, Sfermion, Mirana Ventures, Bitscale Capital and Mantle EcoFund.
NPC Labs is building a Web3 gaming infrastructure called B3.fun that makes transactions faster and at low gas fees. The Base-based scaling platform also allows users to play games from different networks without bridging or switching networks.
The startup has collaborated with the chain abstraction layer ChainSafe to enable a seamless gaming experience on B3.fun.
“We believe by helping to build the best in class infrastructure for developers and a simple, frictionless onboarding for gamers, we’ll be able to build a lasting on-chain gaming culture and ecosystem,” CEO Daryl Xu said.
Describing B3.fun as “a microservices-like Layer 3 ecosystem”, Xu said he and his former Coinbase colleagues noticed the increasing engagement and utility in gaming and recognised the opportunity to “grow the gaming ecosystem exponentially and push further to create a simple, sticky and fun experience to bring more users on-chain.”
NPC Labs is not exclusive to Web3 builders, the founders believe that Web2 game developers have started to recognise the potential of on-chain gaming “both as a distribution platform and a better way to monetize,” Xu said.
Because building games on-chain is “still difficult” Xu believes B3.fun can be used as a one-stop shop for game developers.
“For developers, we are contributing to unique infrastructure that gives them full control over everything — from publishing to revenue generation and growth. For gamers, we will meet users where they are at and remove crypto barriers to entry,” Xu added.
Although B3.fun currently supports Base, Ethereum and EVM-compatible chains, there are plans to expand to other networks including Solana.
Commenting on his firm’s leading role in the fundraising, Franklin Bi, general partner at Pantera Capital said the rapid growth of the Base ecosystem is one of the reasons Pantera invested in NPC Labs, which he believes has an exciting vision to elevate the ecosystem with B3.
“B3’s infrastructure and tooling will bring a new dimension to Base by empowering developers to build great games and on-chain experiences for consumers.”
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