Funding round led by Naver, WE Ventures, and Honest Ventures
(SEOUL, South Korea, 6 JANUARY 2021) – Planetarium has successfully raised a US$2M round from South Korea’s leading internet portal Naver, co-led by investors WE Ventures and Honest Ventures.
Planetarium is developing Libplanet, a blockchain technology for multiplayer games, and a decentralized RPG Nine Chronicles. With Libplanet, studios can create massively multiplayer games that run peer-to-peer without centralized servers. This also enables gaming communities to fully create and operate their own serverless MMOs. Empowering player creativity at such a scale will lead to breakthroughs in how online games are developed.
Planetarium was previously selected by the Ubisoft Entrepreneurs Lab, a global startup program fostered by Ubisoft focusing on innovations in the entertainment industry. Nine Chronicles, an open source RPG backed by Ubisoft through an advisory partnership, launched its early access in October 2020 and raised US$400K in crowdfunding through its highly competitive presale rounds.
This round is another validation of the industry’s rising interest in decentralized gaming and its infrastructure. Sanghwan Yang, Director of Naver D2 Startup Factory said, “Planetarium is laying down a new foundation for creative gamers to participate in content production. We firmly believe in the direction of the team, and we expect Planetarium to continue innovating how passionate gamers engage with online worlds.”
With funds from this round, Planetarium plans to strengthen second-party support of the Libplanet engine and grow the Nine Chronicles player ecosystem. Planetarium CEOs JC Kim and Kijun Seo said, “We are excited to join forces with investors who share our vision of decentralized gaming. We now have the resources to expand the ecosystem of Libplanet and Nine Chronicles — we can hardly wait to build out a new disruptive gaming experience powered by our passionate community.”
For more information, please contact Kijun Seo, Co-CEO [email protected]
Media Kit / Planetarium Site / Nine Chronicles Site / Nine Chronicles Teaser
About Planetarium
Planetarium is a blockchain company pioneering the ecosystem for community-powered online games. Planetarium’s technology equips developers with powerful tools to create fully decentralized, cross-platform blockchain games that can live forever on networks powered by the players. The team is also developing Nine Chronicles, an open source, decentralized role-playing game in early access since 2020. To learn more, please visit https://planetariumhq.com/.
About NAVER and D2 Startup Factory
NAVER Co., Ltd. is South Korea’s largest web search engine, as well as a global ICT brand that provides services including LINE messenger, currently with over 200 million users from around the world. In 2018, NAVER was ranked as the 9th most innovative company by Forbes and top 6th Future 50 company by Fortune magazine. To learn more, please visit https://www.navercorp.com/.
D2 Startup Factory (D2SF) is an investment project by Naver that was launched in May 2015 with the goals of vitalizing the South Korean tech start-up environment and fostering talents. As of 2021, it has invested in 59 start-ups with notable technical skills in areas such as AI, blockchain, hardware, VR/AR and IoT. To learn more, please visit http://www.d2startup.com/.
