Gaming platform Planetarium attracts $42 mn, valued at $293 mn

The NFT-based open source platform has raised its corporate value to 35 times in less than a year

Nine Chronicles, a game based on Planetarium's blockchain game development engine

Minki Koo 1

2021-11-28 18:46:23 kook@hankyung.com

Startups

South Korea’s non-fungible token (NFT)-based open source gaming platform Planetarium, under Nine Corp. Inc., is slated to attract around 50 billion won ($41.8 million) in Series B investment as early as next month. Valued at around 350 billion won, the company is in the final stage of investment negotiations.

Animoca Brands Corp., a Hong Kong-based global blockchain company and owner of The Sandbox metaverse platform, led the investment. Samsung Electronics’ venture capital investment arm Samsung Next is also considering an investment, according to game industry sources.

Planetarium was valued at around 10 billion won in January when it attracted 2.1 billion won in Series A investment. Gaming industry sources say this 35-fold increase in corporate value in less than a year is unprecedented in Korea’s VC industry, showing intensive hype in NFT-related stocks.

The Series B investment is expected to bring its partnerships with Animoca Brands and Com2uS, a leading Korean game developer, as well as expand the NFT-based game ecosystem. Last month, Animoca Brands closed a capital raise of $65 million at a pre-money valuation of $2.2 billion from global investors including Com2uS, Liberty City Ventures, Ubisoft Entertainment, Sequoia China and Dragonfly Capital.

Planetarium is well known for its blockchain game development engine Lib Planet. Lib Planet-based games can be played without a central server, allowing gamers to continuously play even if a game company stops operation.

The engine also enables play-to-earn (P2E), or earning money while gaming. In detail, Lib Planet-based game users can collect gold in the game and produce and own NFTs. The game users can exchange the NFTs with Planetarium’s coins for cash.

Planetarium launched the massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) Nine Chronicles using Lib Planet last year. Securing 2,000 users, the NFT-based game has more than 80,000 people on the waiting list to join the game.

Write to Minki Koo at kook@hankyung.com
Jihyun Kim edited this article.