Institutional investors continue to recognize the value of the fast-growing gamified financial sector, with Salad Ventures being the latest beneficiary of their largesse. The company raised $13.5 million in its private sale, with the participation of several major blockchain-focused hedge funds and family offices.
The product that had investors reaching for their checkbooks was GuildOS, described as a complete operating system for winning in the gaming space. GuildOS is ostensibly a web-based platform that can be leveraged to form, manage, and grow a community of dedicated players who pool resources and share income with each other. Investors participating in the round included Alameda Research, Alan Howard and BH Digital, C2 Ventures, Foundation Capital, Gemini Frontier Fund, Winklevoss Capital, Crossbeam Venture Partners, Rarestone Capital, and Polygon Studios, among others.
Gold Standard Guild Management
This is not the first time the Singapore-based startup has received a multimillion-dollar capital injection: Last year, Salad Ventures raised $2 million from backers including Multicoin Capital, Kosmos, and Anthony “Pomp” Pompliano. At the time, the company focused on Salad Academy, an online learning portal created to train future gamefi scholars. While most of the funds are expected to be used to add more features to GuildOS, some of the money could also go towards refining Salad Academy.
With GuildOS, Salad Ventures hopes to attract the best and brightest players in the industry, especially those looking to build their own elite team. The web-based tool provides an intuitive dashboard from which users can easily manage university accounts, cryptocurrency wallets, private keys, and perform in-game actions such as breeding or cloning. Additionally, it is possible to manage guilds that operate on a variety of different platforms.
Those who want to take advantage of this nifty gamefi OS will need to get an NFT that works as an authentication key, along with the OS and NFTs, which should be released in the middle of this year.
Marty Stenson, Ventures Lead at Gemini, said it’s the “full suit of Apollo Squad.” GuildOS and Salad Academy,” which gave the company “the unique ability to provide the building blocks necessary for the emerging P2E ecosystem to thrive.”
Combining elements of online gaming, decentralized finance, and community governance, Gamefi has become a popular way for gamers to have fun while lining their pockets. Guilds, on the other hand, allow players to compete for bigger prizes while instilling a sense of brotherhood and community. Some guilds even invest directly in NFT collectibles, with decisions made by a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO).
“Despite the fact that a deep ecosystem has grown in the last 12 months, most P2E gaming tools only focus on Axie Infinity and provide ‘read-only’ panels, thus not solving the real challenges of operate a play-to-win guild,” says Felix Sim, co-founder and project manager of Salad Ventures.
“What we are doing is solving this problem head-on by decentralizing the gaming guild model and developing a guild operating system that can interface directly with gaming APIs and blockchains, allowing administrators to coordinate multiple university accounts in different blockchain games.”
Gamefi’s vast interconnected ecosystem doesn’t just benefit gamers; it also drives record transaction volumes on the underlying blockchains responsible for processing NFT transactions and in-game payments. The question is, how many gamefi power brokers will sign up when GuildOS releases later this year?
