By Riley Kaminer
Miami web3 startup Blockus announced that it has just raised a $4 million pre-seed round led by Maple VC. Altos Ventures also participated in the round, alongside a series of angel investors such as Zhuoxun Yin from Magic Eden, Michael Ma from CreatorDAO, and Bryan Pelligrino from LayerZero.
This news comes off the back of Blockus’s successful completion of a16z’s Crypto Startup Accelerator. In an interview with Refresh Miami, Blockus co-founder and CEO Jess Zhang said she was “very humbled and honored” by the investor interest in this round, which was ultimately over-subscribed. She underscored the privilege she feels to have Maple VC lead the round, as the Blockus team has worked closely with them in an informal capacity over the last few years.
“Blockus has the potential to be the catalyst for a new era of gaming, built on the principles of decentralization and player ownership,” Andre Charoo, general partner at Maple VC, said in a statement. “The founders’ deep understanding of both gaming and Web3 technologies, combined with their track record, makes them an exceptionally compelling team to back. We believe Blockus is poised to lead the way in the Web3 gaming revolution.”
Alongside co-founder and CPO Michael Wei, Zhang and Blockus’s eight-person full-time team are building an all-in-one ecosystem for web3 gaming experiences. The goal: to securely and seamlessly enable game studios to onboard their players and build on-chain gaming features.
And Blockus has already seen significant early traction, with around 30 partners already signed onto the platform. This includes Ambrus Studio, the team behind E4C: Final Salvation.
“As innovators in the gaming space, we’re proud to partner with a company that’s pushing the boundaries of what’s possible,” said Ambrus Studio’s founder and CEO, Johnson Yeh. “The potential for Web3 in gaming is immense, and we’re confident that Blockus will play a major role in shaping its future.”
This infusion of capital will enable Blockus to grow, with a focus on expanding its team and sales pipeline while continuing to invest in product development. Zhang signaled that the company plans to hire sales and business development leaders, including in APAC, where Blockus is seeing particular growth.
So what’s up with web3 these days? According to Zhang: “I see a shift towards the vision driven by Chris Dixon [a16z’s web3 evangelist] – read, write, own. Shifting the framework from crypto to web3: the new internet.”
At the core of this idea – as well as Blockus’s platform – is decentralization. “It rests on the philosophy of trustlessness,” Zhang explained. “We embody that in a couple of ways,” including developing zero knowledge programming interfaces instead of the more typical, but centralized, APIs.
The majority of Blockus’s team, including Zhang and Wei, lives in Miami. Still bullish on our local tech scene, Zhang hopes to spin up a hacker house in Midtown. And it wouldn’t just be for a week – it would be for the duration.
“We have great engineers from Buenos Aires and want to make it convenient for them to come to work with us in-person,” she said. “Having the ability to travel to HQ as an employee perk is pretty attractive in this remote world.”
READ MORE IN REFRESH MIAMI:
- Meet the web3 entrepreneur building the next generation of gaming
- Web3 wunderkind Felix Hartmann on the future of crypto, metaverse, and why you should strap on some VR goggles
- AEXLAB team launches VAIL VR, part of VR game engine for multiplayer games
- With investors betting on the ‘long game,’ Betr raises $15M at $375M valuation
- Gaming monetization marketplace Scuti secures $10M
- Salsa Valley onboards users into web3 with a spicy mix of games, a metaverse, and crypto
- Lucy Guo’s Passes raises $40M Series A to turn top content creators into tomorrow’s big brands
