Animoca Brands raises another $10M to boost the growth of Moca Network

Animoca Brands, one of the biggest and most active VC funds, is putting its ETH to work again. This time, Animoca Brands led another funding round for its Web3 project, Moca Network. 

Moca Network, the Web3 and digital identity hub, has raised another $10M, led by Animoca Brands, one of the most active investors in Q3. Moca Network, the Mocaverse, and other side projects will receive one more round of funding, with the participation of OKX Ventures, CMCC Global, Republic Crypto, and Decima. Other backers include Kingsway Capital and Hong Sheng, formerly Sequoia China. 

The fundraising is in the upper range for Animoca Brands, which established its reputation as a highly active Tier 2 fund. Animoca continues to rebuild infrastructure for gaming and metaverse projects, expanding beyond games and into services. The fundraising aims to expand the building of a scalable network for onboarding a wide user base into crypto. 

Mocaverse is the current Animoca Brands main project, building a consumer platform for Web3 3 traffic and rewards. The Mocaverse will be a network of third-party networks, with a single identity and login entry point. The Mocaverse also included an NFT collection, which is mostly idle. However, Animoca Brands still has ambitions to expand the MOCA brand and drive innovation with a focus on Southeast Asia. 

Mocaverse spent a year of active fundraising

The latest undisclosed round gives Mocaverse and its projects a valuation of $1B based on the implied fully diluted value of MOCA tokens. On the open market, the MOCA token has a capitalization of only $116M. MOCA tokens trade at a current valuation of $0.09, for a lower market value compared to the funding rounds.

The funding round will be based on Simple Agreements for Future Equity (SAFEs) with all participating investors. The raise will also take into account Animoca Brand shares, which will be converted from Australian dollars to USD. 

Based on the dollar value of the investment, all investors will receive MOCA tokens with a 30-month vesting schedule. The funding round is set at a price of $0.113 per token, higher than the current market performance of MOCA as of November 12. 

Only 1.28B MOCA are in circulation, putting significant weight in the hands of early backers and other investors. MOCA is a relatively niche project, developing its basics at the time when other narratives and memes are more active. As a result, only 3,557 holders own MOCA, which is still quite far from the target for mass adoption. 

MOCA is an exception for being a high-profile token with limited listings on big exchanges. MOCA still depends on Bybit and Bitget for most of its volumes, though its most active pair is on HTX. 

Moca offers a mix of Web3 features, as well as Moca ID, an on-chain identity that can be used within its ecosystem. So far, Moca has been one of the most actively developed and incubated projects, with a total of $46.98M raised. The platform raised through a mix of launchpads and ICO sales, in addition to undisclosed all-purpose rounds with some of the active funds at the time. 

Moca has been doing the fundraising rounds since September 2023 and has become one of the chief developments for Animoca Brands. After the slowdown in Web3 games and play-to-earn, Animoca Brands pivoted to DeFi, on-chain identity, and utility projects. The project has kept a relatively low profile compared to other overhyped launches. However, the project still has limited reach relative to its fundraising success.

The Mocaverse project already released Realm SDK for third-party ecosystems to build reputation-based apps. The other main product is the Moca ID, an on-chain identity for multiple apps. All the products are tied to the Mocaverse game, which also includes NFT-based identities.