Animoca Leads $10 Million Funding Round In Hong Kong NFT Platform Amid Crypto Craze

Ucollex, a Hong Kong-based NFT platform, has pulled $10 million fresh capital from local blockchain game developer Animoca Brands. The startup’s latest funding round comes as sales of the digital collectibles are gaining ground in the city, which has seen an increasing number of projects launched over the past year. 

Another investor who also participated in the fundraising is MCP IPX One Fund, an investment fund established by the Japanese branch of MCP Asset Management and Animoca, according to a statement issued on Thursday. 

Ucollex said the financing round values the company at $110 million. The new capital will be used to invest in blockchain technology and venture into the metaverse, the firm said. The startup added that it is hoping to increase its presence across the anime, manga and toy communities. 

“With the market demand for NFTs skyrocketing in 2021 and the NFT trade volume reaching $25 billion, more and more creators are seeking opportunities to use NFTs and Web 3.0 to increase their exposure,” Robert Tran, the company’s cofounder and CEO, said in the statement. “Ucollex is closing the loop between creators and collectors, providing a world where collectors can feel at home and live their passion for collecting through the best three-dimensional art and innovative virtual reality experiences”

NFTs—short for non-fungible tokens—are crypto assets that record the ownership of a digital item such as a piece of artwork, a photo or a video. Anyone can create, or “mint,” NFTs, by uploading their digital files to a blockchain that acts as a public ledger. 

Established in 2020 by Robert Tran and Raymond Hung, Ucollex is a marketplace that sells NFTs featuring toys and pop culture collectibles. Last year, it teamed up with world’s largest crypto exchange Binance and British luxury fashion brand Jimmy Choo to launch a NFT collection. (Disclosure: Binance recently announced a strategic investment in Forbes.)

Prior to Ucollex, Tran cofounded local watch brand Undone and iClick Interactive Asia, a marketing technology company listed on the Nasdaq. While Hung’s career includes a stint serving as the CTO of Undone as well as working at Microsoft Hong Kong for more than a decade.  

Yat Siu, cofounder and chairman of Animoca, said he believes his company’s latest investment in Ucollex will make it easier for intellectual properties to participate in the metaverse, according to the statement. 

Ucollex’s funding round underscores the increasing popularity of NFTs in Hong Kong, which has seen an increasing number of new projects emerged over the past year. Among the successful launches are Shrooms, an NFT collection featuring three-dimensional mushroom avatars with Asian elements such as mahjong and red banners. The project said on its Twitter that all of its 3,888 NFTs were sold out within two minutes after its public launch in January. 

But as the emerging market for NFTs has grown, so too have reports of scams. Monkey Kingdom, a Hong Kong NFT project that has more than 23,000 followers on Twitter, said it became the unwitting victim of theft in December. Buyers of the NFTs lost 7,000 Solana tokens, which translates to about $1.3 million at the time, after a hacker infiltrated the project’s group chat and posted a phishing link, which was used to steal personal data and gain access to their accounts. Monkey Kingdom said it had launched a fund to compensate the victims for some of their losses.