#NFTsummer Have you heard of Yat Siu? If you’re into gaming or into blockchain, maybe you’ve heard of Animoca Brands. Yat Siu is an entrepreneur and angel investor based in Hong Kong who founded Animoca Brands. Animoca Brands recently announced its raise of $88M at a $1B valuation to combine games with digital collectibles, also known as NFTs. Investors in the round include Kingsway Capital and AppWorks.
Have you heard Yat’s story? If you listen to some of his interviews, you’ll get a fuller picture of who he is and how he managed to build Animoca Brands, a unicorn blockchain company that boasts a broad portfolio of games including The Sandbox and products using popular IPs such as Formula 1®.
Yat was born in Austria to two musicians, so naturally he grew up studying music alongside his parents. He realized at a young age that he was more passionate about tech when he taught himself programming and built a software on an Atari for himself that composed music on the keyboard.
When Atari heard about this program, they reached out to Yat and hired him to work for them. Yat moved to Germany for a while to work with Atari, and then eventually made his way to Hong Kong in 1995, where he started the first internet provider in Hong Kong. After a few years, he founded Outblaze, a white-label SaaS provider, which he eventually sold to IBM in 2009.
In 2011, Yat founded Animoca to make mobile gaming apps and in 2014 it became Animoca Brands to focus on the blockchain gaming market. He had experienced what centralized platforms like the App Store could do to sellers and creators when one of their best gaming apps was temporarily banned, and wanted to help build a more decentralized world where decision-making is more open.
Check out what Yat has to say about how he got involved in crypto and NFTs, and how it relates to gaming.
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https://youtu.be/sUdkWHIFmSY
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