Led by Andreesen Horowitz, the raise will go towards building out Yuga’s new NFT metaverse ‘Otherside’.

Yuga Labs – the owners of the two most popular NFT collections – has announced the completion of a $450 million fundraise to develop its NFT metaverse project. This brings the company’s valuation up to $4 billion.

News of the raise emerged in a company press release on Tuesday, which revealed a16z as the leader of the funding round.

Andreesen Horowitz has become deeply involved with investing in all things web 3 and appears to have followed through on Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC)’s proposed investment deal as well.

The investment leader is joined by Metaverse game ‘The Sandbox’, crypto exchanges FTX and MoonPay, and others.

Together, the provided funds will scale Yuga’s team, and support joint ventures and partnerships that it has planned.

Yuga owns the intellectual property for BAYC, CryptoPunks, and Meebits, the first two being the most highly valued NFT collections on the market. They have market caps of 1,060,611.52 ETH ($3.1 billion) and 716,147.28 ETH ($2.1 billion) respectively.

The Metaverse project the company is pursuing is called Otherside, which will be an interoperable world connecting the entire NFT universe.

Greg Solano, a Yuga Labs co-founder, believes the game will stand out from other Metaverse projects which are less competitive.

“You only play with people and make friends because you’re getting your ass kicked,” he said. “Basically, we don’t think deep social experience comes from essentially a Zoom chat and walking around saying ‘hi.’”

Despite the growing excitement around NFTs, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin isn’t exactly a fan – especially not of Bored Apes. “The peril is you have these $3 million monkeys and it becomes a different kind of gambling,” he said of their incredibly high value.

https://cryptopotato.com/yuga-labs-valued-at-4-billion-after-450-million-raise/