LandVault, the largest metaverse construction company, has announced its strategic funding round with several web3 firms, including The Sandbox, a leading metaverse platform backed by Animoca Brands and Softbank, the Gemini Frontier Fund, HodlCo, and Kingsway Capital, a $3B hedge fund and a large shareholder in Animoca Brands.
This comes after LandVault raised a total of $37m, the last round being a $25m Series B in November 2021 at the time when the company was focused on in-game advertising. Since then, LandVault has pivoted into building metaverse infrastructures, and has completed over 100 million square feet in building experiences for brands including Mastercard, Heineken, Hershey’s, Standard Chartered and L’Oreal. With this round, LandVault is adding web3 investors and partners to its cap table.
Having recently announced its expansion, the capital will be used to grow commercial operations across their hubs in Dubai, Europe, US, and Asia, and will further invest in technology, notably AI-powered tools to accelerate creation and monetization of metaverse content.
The round is a good credibility boost at a time when the hype surrounding the metaverse is said to be down, valuations are discounted, and many projects have yet to pan out. The investor demand for metaverse infrastructure is still high, and paying testament to this is LandVault’s 9-figure valuation from last year.
The global metaverse market size was valued at USD 100.27 billion in 2022 and is projected to grow to USD 1,527.55 billion by 2029, at a CAGR of 47.6%. “In addition, the rising investment in retail and e-commerce and the surge in the adoption of platforms looking to showcase products in a virtual environment continue to bolster market growth.”
“Like us, our new investors see the metaverse as the future of the internet, a more immersive platform to share experiences. Getting there will be a long road, and it is great to bring together investors and partners that are also committed to this vision” says CEO of LandVault, Sam Huber.
Initially, LandVault grew as a development company within The Sandbox. Over time, the company scaled teams to build on other platforms, including photorealistic work on Unity and Unreal. Today the company counts over 130 full time builders, creating projects for the world largest organisations, and has used these experiences to take their data and monetization products to market, to help clients drive ROI in the metaverse.
“LandVault has established itself in just a year as one of the most active metaverse builders” said Sebastien BORGET, COO & Co-Founder of The Sandbox. “We’re pleased to support them further on this journey, as they continue to develop their activities and technology to inspire many other creators of the Metaverse”.
“Our vision has always been to accelerate the economy of the metaverse, and the latest progress in AI technology is helping us fast track our roadmap, ” explains Huber. The metaverse needs a ‘Wordpress moment’ for anyone to build in the metaverse as easily as building a website, and we are investing heavily in R&D to build these tools”.
