NPC Labs, an infrastructure startup for web-3 gaming co-founded by three former Coinbase employees, has secured $21 million in pre-seed and seed funding rounds.
The company said that NPC Labs has raised $21 million in total investment, including a recent $3 million pre-seed round, thanks to the leadership of the most recent $18 million seed round. Makers Fund, Hashed, Collab+Currency, Sfermion, Mirana Ventures, Bitscale Capital, and Mantle EcoFund are among the other investors in the rounds.
NPC Labs was established in April of this year, and by early July, it had finished its funding round. Co-founder and CEO Daryl Xu hopes to greatly increase the uptake of on-chain gaming alongside his colleagues Viktoriya Hying and Sean Geng.
Xu, who was formerly employed by Coinbase’s Layer 2 project Base as a gaming and onramp lead, believes that actual people might be effectively engaged in gaming beyond conjecture.
NPC Labs hopes to increase the uptake of on-chain gaming through B3.fun, a gaming scaling ecosystem based on Base. According to Base, B3.fun is a “microservices-like Layer 3 ecosystem” that enables nearly gasless transactions and high transaction throughput.
Chain abstraction technology, developed in collaboration with ChainSafe, makes this feasible by eliminating users’ need to switch or bridge networks to play games. The platform aims to create an on-chain gaming culture and environment that endures by providing developers with best-in-class technology and providing players with an easy, frictionless onboarding experience.
Web2 game creators are beginning to see on-chain gaming’s promise as a better way to monetize their games and a new distribution channel. On the other hand, constructing on-chain is still difficult.
By acting as a one-stop shop for game creators, managing infrastructure, and helping with marketing and distribution, B3.fun seeks to make this process easier so that developers may concentrate on making exciting games.
The B3.fun platform is in its testnet phase, supporting games built on Ethereum, Base, and other EVM-compatible blockchains, with plans to include Solana. The mainnet launch will be announced by B3 and its governing foundation, which will also decide on the potential launch of a B3 token.
Franklin Bi of Pantera Capital is excited about partnering with NPC Labs, noting that B3’s infrastructure will boost the Base ecosystem by empowering developers. NPC Labs, based in the U.S., plans to expand its team from five to ten employees, adding roles in engineering, marketing, and global go-to-market strategies.
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