A trio of Coinbase alums is leveling up the web3 gaming world with a $21 million successful funding round.
NPC Labs, a web3 gaming infrastructure startup founded by three former Coinbase employees, has secured $21 million in pre-seed and seed funding rounds.
Pantera Capital led the latest seed round of $18 million, contributing to NPC Labs’ total funding of $21 million, which includes a recent pre-seed round of $3 million. Other investors in these rounds are Makers Fund, Hashed, Collab+Currency, Sfermion, Mirana Ventures, Bitscale Capital, and Mantle EcoFund.
Established in April of this year, NPC Labs began its fundraising efforts immediately and concluded the process earlier this month, as reported by co-founder and CEO Daryl Xu. Xu did not disclose details regarding the structure of the round or the company’s valuation.
Xu, previously the gaming and onramp lead at Coinbase’s Layer 2 project Base, co-founded NPC Labs with his former Coinbase colleagues, Viktoriya Hying and Sean Geng. Hying, the co-founder and COO, was previously the NFT and creator lead at Base. Geng, the co-founder and CTO, served as an engineering manager at Coinbase.
NPC Labs aims to boost the adoption of on-chain gaming. Xu mentioned that their experience as Base day 0 contributors highlighted significant engagement and utility in gaming with real users. This insight led them to explore ways to expand the gaming ecosystem and create a simple, engaging, and enjoyable experience to attract more users to on-chain gaming.
“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.”
At the time of writing, the B3.fun platform is in testnet and supports games built on Ethereum, Base, and other Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)-compatible blockchains. NPC Labs mentioned that the platform could also onboard games from other blockchains, such as Solana, in the future.
The mainnet launch of B3 is scheduled for a later date, with the announcement to be made by B3 and its governing foundation, according to Xu. When asked about the possibility of B3 launching its own token alongside the mainnet, Xu stated that the decision would be made by the governing foundation.
