After launching the early alpha for its user generated metaverse creation tool, Yahaha Studios impressed two big Asian investors — Alibaba and Tencent — to pick up $40 million in series A+ funding.
The round was co-led by Singapore-headquartered Temasek and the Chinese tech giant Alibaba, following on from an earlier $50 million series A for Yahaha, which counts over 150 employees spread across Helsinki, Shanghai and Seoul.
The funds will be used to grow Yahaha’s community, product, and workforce, as well as its ecosystem. Yahaha has already successfully completed an alpha testing campaign, which attracted over 100,000 game content creators.
The Yahaha Metaverse Building Tool is intended to be understandable by users of all skill levels and even those without any previous game development knowledge. This allows them to drag-and drop their way around creating custom worlds, social spaces, and games.
Portals created by users are an important draw for virtual reality worlds such as Meta’s Horizons Worlds and Microsoft’s AltSpaceAR; there is a large market for tools that allow VR enthusiasts to participate more easily.
Yahaha will also be able to enter the US market with the Series A+ funding. Yahaha is also looking for partnerships to support third-party IPs through their platform.
The round was also supported by Temasek, Alibaba, and China-listed metaverse. 37 Entertainment is an entertainment studio that has credits including the Metaverse’s “first ever” gaming museum, which was launched in April by Meta.
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