Dapper Labs

Dapper Labs builds consumer blockchain products and the Flow blockchain they run on. Its titles include CryptoKitties, NBA Top Shot, NFL ALL DAY, LaLiga Golazos and Disney Pinnacle, along with the Dapper Wallet. The company was spun out in 2018 from Axiom Zen, a Vancouver and San Francisco design studio founded in 2012 that had built CryptoKitties, and it is based in Vancouver, Canada. Roham Gharegozlou is its chief executive. CryptoKitties launched on Ethereum in November 2017 and drew so much traffic that it congested the network.

In March 2018 CryptoKitties raised $12 million in a round led by Andreessen Horowitz and Union Square Ventures, with angels including Naval Ravikant, Mark Pincus and Fred Ehrsam, and was spun out of Axiom Zen as Dapper Labs. In November 2018 Dapper Labs raised a further $15 million in a round led by Venrock that doubled its valuation. After NBA Top Shot took off, the company raised $305 million in March 2021 in a round led by Coatue at a reported $2.6 billion valuation, with Andreessen Horowitz, The Chernin Group, USV, Version One and Venrock joining a long list of athletes and celebrity funds such as Sound Ventures and Dreamers VC. In September 2021 it raised another $250 million, again led by Coatue, at a reported $7.6 billion valuation, with Andreessen Horowitz, GV and Version One Ventures returning and BOND and GIC joining. Together these four reported rounds total about $582 million.

At the time of the September 2021 round, NBA Top Shot had 1.1 million registered users who had traded more than $780 million. Activity cooled afterward: TechCrunch reported in May 2022 that Top Shot did $26 million of sales the prior month. That same month Andreessen Horowitz, Coatue, Union Square Ventures, CoinFund, Digital Currency Group and Cadenza Ventures backed a $725 million ecosystem fund for Flow developers. In February 2023 a federal judge allowed a class action alleging that Top Shot Moments were unregistered securities to proceed. Dapper Labs remains privately held and now describes itself as a venture studio.

Dapper Labs shows how quickly crypto valuations moved in the 2021 cycle. Its earliest backers, Andreessen Horowitz and Union Square Ventures, entered at the spinout in 2018, and the company's reported valuation rose from a few hundred million to $7.6 billion within about three and a half years. No liquidity event has been announced, so the gains for both early and late investors remain on paper and exposed to a reset in digital collectibles demand.