Yat Siu is an entrepreneur and angel investor. Born and raised in Vienna, Austria, he moved to Hong Kong in 1996 to set up Hong Kong Cybercity, the first free web page and email provider in Asia. Before Hong Kong, he landed his first job at Atari in Germany, and later at graphic software company Lexicor, where he served as director and head of the U.S. East Coast division. In the late ‘90s, he set up Outblaze, which was sold to IBM in 2009 and incorporated in IBM’s LotusLive suite of services.
In 2011, he founded Hong Kong-based Animoca, one of the world’s largest apps for developers and publishers. The company is behind hit apps such as Pretty Pet Salon (one of Apple’s top apps of 2011) and Cinderella Cafe. Receiving early funding from venture capital firms Intel Capital and IDG-Accel, Animoca went on to develop and publish hundreds of apps across both Android and iOS platforms.
In 2014, Siu founded Animoca Brands, a company created through the spinoff of the licensing and publishing arms of Animoca, that uses technology like blockchain and artificial intelligence to develop and publish mobile products like The Sandbox, and it’s the official distributor of CryptoKitties in China.
During his fruitful career, Yat Siu was named “Global Leader of Tomorrow” and a “Young Global Leader” by the World Economic Forum and received various other awards for his contributions to business and society.
In 2021, Animoca Brands hit $2.2 billion in valuation. With COVID-19 spreading worldwide, people staying at home pushed the gaming industry to new highs of revenue.
During the year, the company raised over $300 million based on a valuation of $2.2 billion by November, when SoftBank led a $93 million investment in Animoca Brands’ The Sandbox, one of the most promising Web3 metaverse projects across the whole blockchain space. In the range of only two months, Animoca Brands’ digital assets increased up to $15.9 billion in value, mostly coming from The Sandbox’s success.
The company invested heavily in other NFT and metaverse projects, including NBA Top Shot creators Dapper Labs, OpenSea and AlienWorlds.
2021 was also the year Animoca Brands saw several new product launches, including Phantom Galaxies (a “AAA” blockchain third-person shooter game), the REVV token ecosystem, and the Arc8 platform and its GAMEE utility token.
In December 2021, Binance and Animoca Brands launched a $200 million investment program to offer funding for blockchain games.
By January 2022, Animoca Brands had already raised about $360 million at a $5.4 billion valuation, led by Liberty City Ventures and many other VCs. The company, driving digital property rights via NFTs and gaming, is expected to grow the open metaverse and be one of the major players across the whole industry.
Yat Siu is a prolific Twitter user where he often tweets about the open metaverse, NFTs and blockchain games. He reckons, in 2022, more funding and investments will bring the Web3 into new domain and will forge the way we live, play and work for the better.
Yat Siu and Animoca Brands are expected to keep investing both in development and resources within the metaverse and NTFs, as well as in sports, an industry with a high allocation of capital. It is reasonable to expect that we’ll hear more project announcements from Animoca Brands for release in 2022 and beyond.
Founder, Investor
Animoca, LCX
