Neon Machine Secures $20 Million Led by Polychain

Neon Machine, the US-based game studio that created the popular first-person shooter Shrapnel, has announced that it secured $20 million in Series A funding on Wednesday.

The Fund will be used to Support Shrapnel 

The fundraising was led by Polychain Capital, with participation from IOSG Ventures, Griffin Gaming Partners, Franklin Templeton, Brevan Howard Digital, and Tess Ventures.

The funds raised will be used to work on Shrapnel, as this is a crucial time for the gaming platform since it is preparing to release its early-access version in December before the full launch in 2024. The Shrapnel team has more than 70 employees.

The CEO, Mark Long, said, 

“We had a collective dream to break the mold of the traditional game development cycle and design a blockbuster-quality shooter where players truly own and create game assets.”

Comments From Polychain and IOSG Ventures 

Neon Machine was a part of HBO Interactive before standing on its own. It secured $10.5 million in seed funding in 2021, published comic books, and did a PFP NFT collection last year. The company has now raised $37.5 million in total from its seed funding, Series A, as well as private token sale rounds. 

Polychain Capital Partner Josh Rosenthal said, “It’s exciting to witness the team at Shrapnel continue to propel forward towards gameplay while pushing the boundaries of player experience and ownership through blockchain technology.”

IOSG Ventures Founding Partner Jocy Lin said, “As a crypto-native fund, we’re immensely excited about Shrapnel’s potential in leveraging blockchain to define the traditional extraction gameplay.”

What is Shrapnel?

Shrapnel is a sci-fi extraction shooter game. This game has a number of NFT in-game assets, such as weapon parts, cosmetics, and weapons, which are available on the Shrapnel’s Avalanche subnet, a private crypto network running on Avalanche. In April, Shrapnel released its ERC-20 token, SHRAP, on the Avalanche network. 

The multiplayer game has made plans for both solo and team-based gameplay. It is also giving much emphasis on its user-generated content (UGC) potential as it continues to offer players the chance to generate their assets using in-game techs, which will then be minted as NFTs.