Horizon raises $40M to make web3 easy, fun, and powerful for users and builders
We’re thrilled to announce that we’ve raised USD $40m in our Series A financing to make web3 easy, fun, and powerful for users and builders. We’ll use the capital to scale our products, grow our ecosystem, and hire more incredible teammates onto our team.
Today marks a massive leap towards realizing the new dimension where Internet economies are fun, accessible, and for the benefit of all participants.
With our Series A, we welcome some of the world’s strongest and most visionary investors, industry-leading video game companies, and some of the most impactful web3 organizations and pioneers. The round was led by Brevan Howard Digital and Morgan Creek Digital with significant contributions from Take-Two Interactive Software Inc. (owners of Rockstar, 2K, and Zynga), Polygon, Ubisoft, Xsolla, BITKRAFT, Initialized Capital, Quantstamp, Everyrealm, Sky9 Capital, Round13 Capital, Xchange, Translink, CMT Digital, J17, Sentiment Capital, Perpetual Value Partners, Unicorn Partners, plus key individual investors such as Shopify’s CEO Tobias Lütke, Shopify’s VP of Product Acceleration Satish Kanwar, The Sandbox’s Co-founder Sebastien Borget, Sky Mavis and Axie Infinity Co-founder Aleks Larsen, Lolli’s Co-founder Alex Adelman, Mighty Bear Games’ Web3 Director Michael Arnold, and leading Ethereum educator and The Daily Gwei’s Founder Anthony Sassano, amongst other excellent funds, angels, and companies.
Since founding Horizon in late 2017, we’ve been delivering products to solve web3’s shortcomings and unlock utility. We are inspired and grateful to have this incredible group of supporters join our existing investors as we drive web3 adoption on a massive scale.
Our Series A empowers us to grow the Sequence ecosystem by attracting more builders to the platform and enabling the next generation of video games and applications; expand Skyweaver content and community features to make the game even more enriching and engaging; and launch Niftyswap, the decentralized marketplace that makes trading semi-fungible tokens (SFTs), web3 game items, and metaverse collectibles instant, easy, and secure.
Throughout our journey building Skyweaver — which has been touted as “the best blockchain game” where 60% of users are new to web3 — we had to solve a ton of pain points to enable a seamless experience. From user onboarding and wallets, to transactions and gas, data and indexing, tokens and minting, trading and marketplaces, security, onramps, node access, and much more, we had to solve it all to achieve our goal of making web3 applications easy, fun, and secure for everyone. Our solutions are now the products that make up Sequence, the all-in-one web3 developer platform and smart wallet for the Ethereum and EVM ecosystem.
We’re positioning Sequence as the go-to platform for any company or project building a web3 game, metaverse, marketplace, NFT, or consumer-facing web3 product. Sequence makes building web3 games and apps easy, and builders who are web3 native or coming from traditional web2 backgrounds can use Sequence to deliver seamless and user-friendly experiences using any or all of the products in our platform. More than 40 amazing projects have already integrated Sequence, or are in the process of building with Sequence, including web3 games like Skyweaver, Sunflower Land, BoomLand, Ethernia, Mechachain, Metalcore, Mech, i3Soft, CyBall, and Dark Earth; NFT ecosystems like Cool Cats, DAZN Boxing, and Myntr; gaming platforms like Community Gaming; marketplaces like Niftyswap, Nalnda, and OnePlanet; and there are around one hundred incredible web2 gaming and web3-native consumer applications in our pipeline. We’re scaling to support them all — whether they’re building on Ethereum, Polygon, Binance Smart Chain, Arbitrum, Optimism, Avalanche, or another EVM-compatible chain — and we’re excited to onboard all of these applications’ new users into web3 via the friendly, seamless, and secure Sequence Wallet.
“Horizon and Polygon have been collaborating since 2019, and we’re thrilled to deepen our relationship,” said Sandeep Nailwal, Polygon Co-founder. “Both organizations are enabling incredible experiences on Polygon and driving adoption of the Ethereum ecosystem. We are onboarding some of the world’s biggest companies to Polygon, and it’s amazing to have the Sequence platform for developers, so that their journeys into web3 are seamless.”
We’ll use the Series A funds to enhance Skyweaver as well. Since our first playable alpha in December 2018 to Open Beta in February 2022 to today, we’ve deployed 100 patch updates, released 600 cards, and welcomed hundreds of thousands of players to our global community. And, we’re just getting started. With the recent additions of tradable stickers, prestigious Legacy Hero Skins, and Conquest Weekly Treasures to promote sharing, deepen engagement, and enhance the player-owned economy, we’re excited to see how these developments elevate the Skyweaver ecosystem. We’re committed to delivering more value to our community via our Ambassadors and Creators programs, guilds, a more robust tournament circuit, and the continued execution of our rich product roadmap. We’ve had professional Hearthstone, Magic: the Gathering, and Pokémon players tell us they believe Skyweaver could become the greatest trading card game of all time, and we’re committed to living up to that potential.
Series A equips us to expand into a new business pillar as well. This fall, we’ll launch Niftyswap.io, a marketplace for web3 collectibles that provides front-end access to the decentralized and open source Niftyswap protocol. Niftyswap makes trading SFTs easy by delivering access to liquidity on-chain, so that users can instantly buy and sell tradeable items while liquidity providers earn fees. SFTs, enabled by the ERC-1155 token standard that we co-authored in 2018, work especially well for video game and metaverse items as they create healthier markets with improved liquidity and price discovery. Niftyswap.io aims to become the premiere destination for trading SFTs, web3 game items, metaverse collectibles, digital fashion, music, and more.
“We have always had a long-term vision for the future of web3, and are carefully building complementary products to support the ecosystem,” said our Co-founder and CEO Peter Kieltyka. “With Sequence, we enable builders to create the next generation of Internet experiences; with Skyweaver, we deliver a fun, strategic, and rich piece of content for gamers to enjoy; and with Niftyswap, we enable the seamless exchange of SFTs, which are poised to become some the world’s most useful and traded virtual goods.”
From humble beginnings of five founders working around our CEO Peter’s kitchen table, to now 60 brilliant and kind team members spanning 16 countries with the support of the world’s best investors, gaming companies, and web3 pioneers, we’re honoured to play a monumental role in the realization of web3: the next generation of the Internet. Thank you to every single community member, player, builder, user, supporter, teammate, partner, investor, collaborator, and contributor. Together, we’re building the new dimension where economies and experiences are fun, accessible, and for the benefit of all participants.
Love,
Horizon
