True Global Ventures 4 Plus (TGV 4 Plus) Fund, a Global Technology Equity fund headquartered in Singapore, has invested US$10m into The Sandbox, a subsidiary of Animoca Brands and the leading open NFT metaverse platform. TGV 4 Plus has contributed US$10m out of US$93M raised by the The Sandbox on its Series B fundraising round led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2, representing the fund’s first investment in crypto assets.
The investment will enable The Sandbox team to scale its growth as a prime entertainment destination where brands, IPs, and celebrities can engage with their fans through virtual experiences, including games, live performances, and social experiences.
Other investors besides TGV 4 Plus in the round included Animoca Brands, Liberty City Ventures, Galaxy Interactive, Kingsway Capital, LG Technology Ventures, Polygon Studios, Samsung Next, and many more top investors. Wedbush Securities acted as exclusive placement agent and financial advisor for The Sandbox, and Rubicon Law provided legal counsel to The Sandbox.
True Global Ventures’ Vision of the metaverse and future of open entertainment platforms is:
- Multi-metaverse environments powered by Blockchain and Non Fungible Tokens (NFTs) allow actual digital ownership of digital assets that support interoperability, open standards, and transparency.
- These metaverses will have new types of distributed governance, where both large corporations and smaller communities will exist side by side more equitably. Many of these communities will be owned by the communities and creators themselves.
- The innovations in this space will drive Web 3.0 adoption and bring these technologies to the masses for positive change.
- We believe that positive virtual worlds, e.g., open, transparent, sustainable, will positively impact the real world.
TGV 4 Plus Fund first invested in The Sandbox in early 2019 mainly because of the Team, led by Co-Founders and Serial Entrepreneurs Arthur MADRID, CEO and Sebastien BORGET, COO, and their Vision with The Sandbox. Understanding more about what the Founders wanted to achieve, we realized that this Metaverse revolution could be more significant than the Internet and Mobile revolution.
They had success in Pixowl Inc., which created the original award-winning The Sandbox, a 2D metaverse game with 40+ million players in total. As a fund, TGV 4 Plus backs Serial Entrepreneurs, and we recognized their experience of building and maintaining thriving communities and games.
Their strategy is to bring in the top brands and creators with whom people would love to associate themselves. The pivotal point came in March 2020, when we witnessed US$450,000 worth of virtual LAND NFTs being sold within 4 hours. From then on, many of the LAND NFT sales sold for millions of dollars and were sold out within minutes or sometimes within seconds.
The Sandbox experienced tremendous growth in 2021, generating over US$144M in GMV to date, and over 500,000 users now have a connected wallet. Over 165 brands — including Snoop Dogg, The Walking Dead, The Smurfs, Care Bears, Atari, and CryptoKitties — have already formed IP partnerships to create voxelized versions of their worlds and characters in the metaverse. High-profile LAND owners in The Sandbox include Zed Run, Republic Realm, Binance, Bored Ape Yacht Club, CyberKongz, CoinMarketCap, Metakovan, Pranksy, GrowYourBase, MetaKey, South China Morning Post, Zepeto, Socios, the Winklevoss twins, Bill Lee of Craft Ventures and more.
TGV bought our LAND in March 2020, as we want to build a place for virtual deal sourcing and attract top talents. We believe that there will be many more new innovative use cases in The Sandbox and other Metaverses than we know of today.
With the recognition of the growth of Metaverses and new use cases, TGV4 Plus continues to invest in talented serial entrepreneurs through more equity funding rounds with globally ambitious blockchain start-ups. The fund is dedicated to blockchain companies, primarily in
late-stage Series B and C across four verticals: Entertainment, infrastructure, financial services, data analytics, and artificial intelligence (AI). The typical size of each investment ranges from US$3 million to US$10 million, together with entrepreneurs, business angels, family offices, and institutional investors, many with co-investment rights in future equity rounds. Start-ups can reach out via LinkedIn or through the Fund’s Contact page here.
