Coinbase alumni raise $21 million for web3 gaming infrastructure startup NPC Labs

NPC Labs, a web3 gaming infrastructure startup co-founded by three former Coinbase employees, has raised $21 million in pre-seed and seed funding rounds.

Pantera Capital led the latest seed round worth $18 million, bringing NPC Labs' total funding to $21 million, including a recent pre-seed round worth $3 million, the startup said Monday. Other investors in the rounds include Makers Fund, Hashed, Collab+Currency, Sfermion, Mirana Ventures, Bitscale Capital and Mantle EcoFund.

NPC Labs was founded in April of this year, started raising funds then, and quickly wrapped up the process earlier this month, NPC Labs co-founder and CEO Daryl Xu told The Block. He declined to comment on the structure of the round and valuation.

Xu, a former gaming and onramp lead at Coinbase's Layer 2 project Base, co-founded NPC Labs with his two former Coinbase colleagues, Viktoriya Hying and Sean Geng. Hying is NPC Labs' co-founder and chief operating officer and previously worked as NFT and creator lead at Base. Geng is NPC Labs' co-founder and chief technology officer and previously worked at Coinbase as an engineering manager.

With NPC Labs, the trio aims to increase the adoption of on-chain gaming. "As Base day 0 contributors, we saw that there's a lot of active engagement and utility beyond speculation in gaming with real users and not bots," Xu told The Block. "After seeing this trend, we began exploring how we can grow the gaming ecosystem exponentially and push further to create a simple, sticky and fun experience to bring more users on-chain."

NPC Labs building B3.fun

NPC Labs is building B3.fun, a gaming scaling ecosystem built on Base, as its core contributor. Xu said B3.fun is "a microservices-like Layer 3 ecosystem" on Base, which allows for high transactions per second, near gasless transactions, and no bridging or switching networks for users to play the games through chain abstraction technology in partnership with ChainSafe . "We believe by helping to build the best in class infrastructure for developers and a simple, frictionless onboarding for gamers, we'll be able to build a lasting on-chain gaming culture and ecosystem," Xu added.

Web2 game developers are starting to see the potential of on-chain gaming both as a new distribution platform and a better way to monetize, according to Xu. But he said the process of building on-chain remains "too difficult." B3.fun aims to be a one-stop shop for game developers, running infrastructure for developers and helping them with marketing and distribution so they can focus on building fun games, Xu said.

"For developers, we are contributing to unique infrastructure that gives them full control over everything — from publishing to revenue generation and growth. For gamers, we will meet users where they are at and remove crypto barriers to entry," Xu added.

B3.fun mainnet launch and token?

The B3.fun platform is currently in testnet and supports games built on Ethereum ETH +0.12% , Base and other Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)-compatible blockchains . But the platform can also onboard games from other chains such as Solana SOL +4.25% in the future, NPC Labs said.

The mainnet launch of B3 is scheduled for a later date and will be announced by B3 and its governing foundation, Xu said. When asked if B3 will also launch its own token alongside the mainnet, Xu said that decision is up to the governing foundation.

"Given the success and traction of Base, we were naturally excited to partner with NPC Labs on their vision to elevate the Base ecosystem with B3," Franklin Bi, general partner at Pantera Capital, said in a statement. "B3's infrastructure and tooling will bring a new dimension to Base by empowering developers to build great games and on-chain experiences for consumers."

NPC Labs, based in the U.S., currently employs five people, and Xu plans to expand the team to 10 by hiring across functions, including engineering, marketing and global go-to-market.

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