NPC Labs Raises $18M to Scale Gaming on Base Network

Round brings total raise to $21 million and includes participation from Makers Fund, Hashed, amongst others.

NPC Labs, a company aiming to create a GameFi ecosystem on the Base protocol, has recently secured an $18 million funding round, led by Pantera Capital. This round, which brings NPC Labs' total raise to $21 million, will be used to scale gaming on Base.

NPC Labs will use the funds to contribute to B3.fun, a Base gaming ecosystem, and build GameFi products that are easily accessible to non-crypto native users.

“Right now, everyone in crypto is building great applications, but they are mainly targeting crypto-native folks. There are a lot of crypto buzzwords like wallets and LPs being used," said Daryl Xu, NPC Labs' co-founder, in an interview with CoinDesk. "For the average person – the 'Normie' we hope to onboard as the next million or billion users – they don't necessarily care about the technical details. They just want a fun and accessible experience.”

Part of scaling gaming on Base also includes non-Web3 users discovering crypto gaming. To achieve this, NPC Labs will be building out discovery portals like Basement.fun, which will help users get into these games.

“Kickstarting the ecosystem also means building more avenues for non-Web3 users to discover crypto gaming. Part of that is building out discovery portals such as Basement.fun, to help users get into these games," Xu added. "[Basement.fun] is meant to be a discovery portal for games. Think of it like Miniclip or Addicting Games, those old HTML5 and Flash game websites. That's what we're trying to build. The experience will be very simple: you jump on the web app and can immediately start playing without going through a lot of hoops.”

B3 currently supports games built on Ethereum, Base, and other EVM chains in testnet.

Collab+Currency, Sfermion, Mirana Ventures, Bitscale Capital, and Mantle EcoFund also participated in the round.