Murasaki Raises €1.5M in Seed Round With Three Leading VC Partners
We can now announce the close of a successful €1.5 million seed round led by Incubate Fund, one of the largest Japanese venture capital firms, followed by investments from Skyland Ventures and Mint Ventures.
Each firm will work with the team at Murasaki to help us build and ship our unique vision for the future of blockchain gaming which encompasses strong elements of community, collaboration and high-minded development.
Here at Murasaki, our core team is formed from a mix of Japanese and European serial entrepreneurs and developers who are on a mission to disrupt GameFi and produce games entirely different from anything else on the market.
Making full use of blockchain opens new doors and creates endless revenue opportunities for both players and creators. In true Web3 spirit, we will harness the power of community and make a future game engine available to anyone wanting to build blockchain titles.
Work behind the scenes on our inaugural title, Cyberstella, is currently ongoing. This will be an NFT-focused game with a fresh take on the play and earn model and is set to release in early 2023. Meanwhile, an NFT and official token launch will shortly follow after the beta version release in late 2022.
One of the Murasaki co-founders driving this vision forward is Shunsuke Sasaki. He brings with him the core founding team from mobile gaming company Pokelabo Inc which he founded and later sold for $173.8 million after receiving worldwide acclaim for popular titles such as SINoALICE. Shunsuke is now focused on helping deliver on the Cyberstella universe world building process.
Sasaki elaborates: “The world of Cyberstella is set in the year 2222, two hundred years from now in cyberpunk city. The background is that humans began to expand their economic, social and military activities into space after initial explorations were built upon. The birth of interstellar exchanges and the beginning of the second era of voyages allowed the curiosity of humans to greatly accelerate the manifestation of greater possibilities to rapidly expand these very human activities.
“While technological advancement has fine-tuned all living infrastructures to make them much more efficient, there are still noticeable remnants of the landscapes and cities of 2022 although some areas are in ruins. The concept of nation states is fading however there is still great importance placed in clan identities.
“Players can jump into the game world with their NFT avatars, wear low-cost yet effective equipment and set out on a risk-free journey into the galaxy, dreaming of a faraway land.
“We want to provide a world where characters and players can connect emotionally, and where an economic sphere is created.”
The €1.5 million investment and partnership from Incubate Fund, Skyland and Mint gives us the resources and executive power to forge ahead with our commitment to developing our first title, Cyberstella, as well as our second game. Also on the agenda is forming an organization to create value for the governance token $STL, which is due to be issued in January 2023.
Shinnosuke Murata, CEO & co-founder of Murasaki, said: “I was attracted to blockchain technology, which allows consensus building without racial or national boundaries, and founded Murasaki in February 2022.
“This investment round is incredibly exciting for us, as it will allow us to further develop our assets and optimize the beta version of Cyberstella while we add new features, worlds, missions and environments. We are also planning to develop a subsequent title as well. We can’t wait for people to discover what playing a blockchain title is really like.”
Senior figures of our new partners added:
Keisuke Wada at Incubate Fund: “We are thrilled to partner with the Murasaki team, formed by two experienced Japanese entrepreneurs, Mr. Murata and Mr. Sasaki, in taking on the Game-Fi challenge. We look forward to transcending national borders and pioneering an ever-evolving frontier.”
Keisuke Kogure, GP of Mint: “I have worked with Shin and Shunsuke’s team once in the past as part of the management team of a portfolio company, and I am very honored to have the opportunity to support them again. We expect them to promote GameFi, which can potentially expand into mass adoption in the crypto market and will come in the future with a strong team. Keep up the excellent work!”
Kota Murakami, Senior Associate of Skyland Ventures: “We are very pleased to have invested in Murasaki B.V., which aims to become a GameFi studio. We hope that Cyberstella, their first title, will pave the way for a new GameFi format where players can name their own characters, create their own backgrounds and relationships, and develop their own story.”
Yoshihiko Kinoshita, GP of Skyland Ventures: “We first met Murata and Sasaki in March 2017, when they were both on the executive board as management members of a company called Jiraffe, which we had just invested in at the time.”
“Back in April 2022, when we first announced Skyland Ventures’ Web3 specialized fund, we had already heard the news that Murata and Sasaki were teaming up as MURASAKI, and today we are pleased to announce that we are investing in them.”
“We decided to invest in Murasaki for two reasons. First, because of their management experience from the old days. The second reason is that we want to bring together the best Japanese game developers to take on a global challenge. History has proven that the Japanese game industry has been well received across the world, and we will support Murasaki whole-heartedly until they succeed.”
About Murasaki
MurasakiBV is a game development company building Japanese video games on the blockchain. MurasakiBV is the team behind the Cyberstella universe, and all the games, manga, and animations derived from it. MurasakiBV aims to revolutionise the GameFi scene and bring forth the next stage in NFT ownership.
