It’s strange to look back and realise it’s been less than two years since we started ZEBEDEE. Since then, we’ve created a sophisticated set of tools for developers to put Bitcoin into their games, as well as a full suite of products for gamers – from our app, to our growing list of games, to tools for communities and streamers. Today, ZEBEDEE is already with you almost everywhere – mobile, desktop, iOS, Android, Discord, Telegram, Twitch, Firefox, Chrome, you name it. But all of this was just the warm up phase.
Today, we’re very excited to announce we’ve closed a $11.5M Series A funding round! With this funding, we are ready to start the third phase of ZEBEDEE’s journey: entering the market in force.
The way forward – Unlocking billions of value in gaming
At ZEBEDEE, we believe that the only way to open people’s eyes to the massive potential of Bitcoin gaming is to show it to them. We are not interested in creating hype without substance. We are interested in creating tools that revolutionize the world of gaming because of how useful they are and how much value they unlock.
We’ve already built a world-class team of 25 people working fully remote from all corners of the world with a single unified mission: to bring real economies into virtual worlds. Now, we’ve equipped ourselves with the resources to make that happen on a global scale.
Just like the rise of microtransactions unlocked billions in value and enabled the rise of free to play games, nanotransactions are poised to unlock billions more. And there’s no better technology to power these nanotransactions than the Bitcoin Lightning Network, the technological backbone of ZEBEDEE.
As a rule of thumb, the smaller transactions can be, the more value is unlocked within gaming. That’s how in-game purchases and microtransactions revolutionized the industry. But nanotransactions promise to unlock a whole world of new possibilities.
Take our CS:GO integration with ZBD Infuse for example (this was a limited-time demo and is no longer active, but the point stands): with instant nanotransactions within a game, you can get paid every time you shoot someone. Or pick up branded coins in-game. This really wouldn’t work with the legacy payment system, which can’t support transactions much smaller than about $0.7 without incurring fees that are too large to make it economically viable. On ZEBEDEE, you can make transactions as small as $0.0005. When you can tie these nanotransactions to any action inside any game, that’s revolutionary. It’s not just putting virtual economies on par with the real-world economy, but unlocking possibilities that were never possible before. Not in the real world and not in virtual ones either.
And if you think we’re exaggerating with the tiny size of the nanotransactions, we actually already support that all the time in Lightning Crush, where rewards start at 1 satoshi.
We have the team, we have the funding, what’s next?
With the funding from this round, we are going to mainly be focusing on getting much stronger in two areas: scaling our platform’s capabilities so we can support the biggest game developers out there and their massive user bases. And scaling our compliance capabilities, so we can enable the gaming industry to capitalize on the new opportunities we’re unlocking without worrying about regulatory liability.
But we got more than just money from this round. What’s going to be essential moving forward is the amazing level of support we’re getting from our investors as advisors and supporters of our vision. We are very excited and proud of the fact we managed to raise funding from a group of all-star gaming investors!
Our fundraising round was led by Lakestar with participation from Initial Capital, New Form Capital, TVP and numerous gaming angels, including CCP founder Hilmar Veigar Pétursson, Alexis Bonte, Chris Lee, Timo Soininen and John Salter. Existing investors Collab + Currency, Cadenza and Fulgur Ventures also took the opportunity to re-invest, showing even more confidence in the path ZEBEDEE is on.
Armed with new capital, new connections and with the knowledge that some of the biggest players in gaming have full confidence in what we’re doing, we are ready to take ZEBEDEE to the next level. We would like to thank our investors for their support, our growing ecosystem of game developers for taking the leap and trying out Bitcoin gaming, our users for driving our growth and proving the demand for Bitcoin in games and, most of all, our team for all the hard work, dedication and amazing solutions that have put us in position to revolutionize how economies work in games and other virtual worlds.
We really can’t believe how far we’ve come in less than two years. And we’re confident that, when we take a look back in two more, we’ll see this moment as the starting point of something truly massive.
