LAGUNA GAMES RAISES $5M, IN ROUND LED BY BITKRAFT VENTURES & DELPHI DIGITAL, TO LAUNCH “CRYPTO UNICORNS”

San Francisco-based blockchain game development studio Laguna Games has raised US$5M in a seed round led by BITKRAFT Ventures and Delphi Digital. 

The round also attracted participation from Transcend fund, Headline Ventures, and Polygon Studios. The studio says it intends to use the new capital to build out a portfolio of games, with an initial focus on Crypto Unicorns, an open-ended digital pet collection game leveraging blockchain-based assets. 

Laguna Games was founded by Aron Beierschmitt, who has been building mobile games for a decade, and Steven Garcia, former lead engineer at GarageGames, Ngmoco, and DeNA. The studio is focused on creating titles that are living worlds, designed for real-time, large scale, and highly social competition. 

The studio’s first digital nation, Crypto Unicorns, is based around unique Unicorn NFTs which players can utilise in a farming simulation, along with secondary battle loops including jousting, racing, and team RPG. The marketplace is being seeded with 10,000 genesis Unicorn egg NFTs, which will be sold in a pre-sale slated for 15 November 2021. As the only Unicorn genesis eggs that will ever exist, they will form the foundation of the long-term game economy. 

Crypto Unicorns is built to be Ethereum Virtual Machine compatible, and at launch, will be available on the Polygon Network. 

Commenting on developments, Aron Beierschmitt, Co-Founder and CEO of Laguna Games, said: “The blockchain gaming industry is experiencing explosive growth and we are convinced that we are on the verge of the next platform wave. As long-time free-to-play game developers, we are excited to move away from the extractive nature of F2P into fostering and nurturing community-owned game economies through a movement we’ve coined as Play-and-Earn (PAE). Our hope is that Crypto Unicorns will introduce millions of new players globally to the benefits of asset ownership as well as the wider Web3 movement.”

Piers Kicks, Senior Associate at BITKRAFT Ventures, added: “We couldn’t be more excited to back Laguna on their mission to usher in the next generation of blockchain games. Aron and his team possess a rare combination of deep gaming expertise and a strong vision for the role crypto plays in the industry’s future. We firmly believe that the projects on their roadmap, starting with Crypto Unicorns, will be a significant addition to the space as a whole and bring us rich new communities along with them.”

Staying with BITKRAFT Ventures, last month the firm led a $3.5M seed round in Los Angeles-based startup independent game development studio FuzzyBot.