Singapore metaverse player raises $13m seed round

Collab+Currency, Parataxis, MZ Web3 Fund, and Everest Ventures Group – all specialist investors in the segment – also participated.

Jump Crypto, a division of quantitative trading firm Jump Trading Group, established ZTX last year as a joint venture with Zepeto, a 3D avatar app from Korean tech giant Naver. This coincided roughly with Naver launching a USD 100m fund to invest in metaverse concepts.

ZTX has inherited Zepeto’s assets, including a largely female audience of 400m and strategic partnerships with Gucci, Starbucks, and K-pop girl group Blackpink. It claims to be the fourth largest metaverse in the world behind Roblox, Fortnite, and Minecraft.

The business offers immersive 3D environments for socialising, gaming, and entertainment based on non-fungible tokens (NFTs), cryptographic instruments that allow users to prove ownership of digital assets and underpin the platform’s internal micro-economy.

The company has described the platform as a “playground for creativity.” Much of the model focuses on community building and providing infrastructure for web3 creators to build out environments. To this end, ZTX recently teamed up with US-based NFT start-up Dust Labs to set up a suite of tools that help creators establish intellectual property partnerships.

“We believe that ZTX has the potential to create a unique world, setting it apart from all other web3 metaverse projects,” Yuki Kanayama, a general partner at MZ Web3, said in a statement. “The seamless integration of digital asset creation and trading in the metaverse with web3 technology is truly exciting, making their application within web3 applications a natural fit.”

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• Topics
• Southeast Asia
• Media
• Technology
• Early-stage
• Singapore
• South Korea
• USA
• Naver
• metaverse
• Web 3.0
• non-fungible token (NFT)
• Cryptocurrency
• gaming