Temasek’s Vertex Leads $4 Million Investment in CARV to Build Gaming Credential and Data Infrastructure

CARV has raised $4 Million in seed funding led by Vertex, Temasek Holding’s venture capital arm, with participation from EVOS (ATTN Group), SNACKCLUB, Infinity Ventures Crypto, YGG SEA, UpHonest Capital, Lyrik Ventures, Lintentry Foundation, PAKADAO, 7UpDAO, Angel Investor Aliaksandr Hadzilin (NEAR’s co-founder), among others. Many investors bring infrastructure and gaming ecosystem synergies to CARV, especially across the US, Europe, LATAM, and Southeast Asia markets.

The Los Angeles-based company set out with a mission to empower gamers with data sovereignty via gaming credentials. “Gamer activities span across devices, platforms, and into real life. However, their time, effort, and money spent remain data points scattered across isolated ecosystems, with limited value to gamers.” Says Victor Yu, CARV’s co-founder and COO. “By creating the infrastructure to piece these breadcrumbs together, we are unlocking tremendous opportunities in how gamers interact in the gaming universe.” Gamers now own and self-sovereign their data, with which they can achieve their hard-earned achievements and be recognized for community contribution on CARV.IO. Moreover, gamers can explore the semantic discovery of friends & games, and unlock credential-gated gaming premiums and governance privileges based on their past gaming experience.

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CARV is also building data infrastructure and analytics to empower game studios to accurately recognize gamer activities, capture an insight-driven understanding of the user base, and reach the desired group of users effectively. “There is a paradigm shift in how games think about user acquisition, business model, and in-game economy design. With the shift comes challenges to games’ sustainability. CARV is uniquely positioned to work with game partners to address these challenges.” comments Victor.

CARV launched its Alpha version in May 2022 after graduating from UPenn Wharton’s Cypher Blockchain Accelerator. Since then, CARV has integrated with more than 20 blockchains and enabled more than 300K registered users to view their all-in-one achievement display. A credential-based governance experiment is CARV’s Guardian Program, where more than 2000 community members applied to contribute towards community management and content creation. CARV has also worked with more than 100 game studios. These game partners include triple-A and innovative games globally, such as Illuvium, Apeiron, Splinterlands, Genopets, Delysium, Drawshop Kingdom, Big Time, Ultiverse, and more.

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Amongst downturns in macroeconomic conditions and the crypto market, the timing of this round speaks volumes to investors’ conviction in CARV’s vision and execution capability. “With the belief that gaming will be the most important segment track for linking traditional users and enthusiasts in the web3 world, we are very optimistic about the future market of web3 gaming.” Comments LI Wei, partner at Vertex, the venture fund which invested in Binance in 2018. “Besides game studios, we focus on the infrastructure of web3 games, particularly on gaming identity platforms. Therefore, we deeply believe that CARV has the potential to be the fast-growing head player in this section.”

With the new funding, CARV will onboard additional talents and continue to build the interoperable credential infrastructure alongside ecosystem partners. CARV states that “the open infrastructure that encourages collaboration is important. But, more importantly, as an early mover, it is also our onerous to create world-class applications, tools, and support communities for gamers and games alike, to educate and onramp more users in an enjoyable, seamless way.” CARV’s team is situated in Silicon Valley, Los Angeles, and Singapore, tapping into each region’s tremendous engineering, product development, and game operations talent pool. Many of CARV’s team come from product-first tech and gaming companies like Google, Twitter, TikTok, Reddit, dLive.tv, Facebook, Microsoft, Tencent, and Garena.

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