Can’t keep a good ninja down
It seems you can’t keep a good collection down, not for long anyway. Fresh off of a bit of a scandal involving the founder of the project, it would appear Chiru Labs, based in Los Angeles and the creator of the Azuki NFT brand has plans to raise $30 million in an upcoming Series A funding round.
The details come from sources inside the community that state the amount being raised if collected wold put the company at a valuation between $300 and $400 million. The sources state that the bulk of the funds is already committed and the round only needs to be closed for this to be a reality, sources cautioned that the details are not finalized however.
Previously Doodles netted $54 million and a $704 million valuation due to a funding round led by Seven Seven Six , Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian’s venture capital firm. Also raised $50 million from a funding round led by Andreessen Horowits (a16z). All of these projects are still following in the footsteps of Bored Apes creator Yuga Labs which raised $450 million back in April in a round that was also led by a16z, the startup is now worth over $4 billion.
For those not in the know Azukis are a 10,000 collection of sideways facing anime-styled characters, mostly ninjas or samurai. The characters have varying moods, weapons and accessories. Some of the rarest traits are “Spirit” for body “ Golden Shuriken” for Offhand , “Sprit Fluffy” for hair and “Golden Headphones” . One rare Azuki with all of those traits sold for over 420 ETH ( more than a million USD at the time )
Very rare Azuki
The project saw a very high floor of over 30ETH at one time before the founder made an error outing himself as the founder of other rugpulls. Currently the floor of the project sits at about 10ETH and is a favorite among the crypto elite. Arthur CEong, founder of DeFiance Capital has a rare Azuki as his twitter profile picture as does Hong Kong real estate billionaire Adrian Cheng as he has purchased 101 of the Azuki NFTs.
