The Azuki creator is almost done raising $30 million

Chiru Labs, which is based in Los Angeles and makes the popular Azuki NFT collection, wants to get at least $30 million in a Series A funding round.

The goal amount was confirmed by three people who knew about the fundraising effort. One of these sources says that most of the money has already been put in, and that if the round is finished, Chiru will be worth between $300 million and $400 million. A fourth person who knows about the deal said that the details aren’t set in stone yet, but they will be soon.

Chiru and the project’s founder, who goes by the name Zagabond, didn’t answer our questions.

The news comes just a week after Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit and a fan of NFTs, had his venture capital firm 776 raise $54 million at a valuation of $704 million for Doodles, another NFT company. On August 30, the company that makes Moonbirds, Proof Collective, raised $50 million in a round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). The creators of Azuki, Doodles, and Moonbirds are following in the footsteps of Yuga Labs, which in March raised $450 million in a round led by a16z and was valued at $4 billion.

Azukis are a collection of 10,000 anime characters that show them in different poses and with things like hats and weapons. A very rare part of the set sold for 420 ETH, which at the time was more than a million US dollars. Based on data from OpenSea, the cheapest Azukis are now worth about 11.2 ETH, or about $14,000.

People who have a lot of cryptocurrency like the collection. Arthur Cheong is the founder of the web3 investment firm DeFiance Capital. His Twitter profile picture is a rare Azuki. Adrian Cheng, a real estate mogul and billionaire in Hong Kong, just bought 101 Azuki NFTs. Bloomberg says that Cheng is currently trying to get $200 million to put into the cryptocurrency market.

But Azuki’s rise to power has not been smooth. In May, Zagabond, the person who started Azuki, wrote a blog post in which they talked about three failed NFT projects they had worked on and then given up on before starting Azuki. At the same time, the average price of an Azuki fell from more than 30 ETH to 10 ETH and hasn’t gone back up yet.

In general, the NFT market has been having a hard time in the past few months. The Block Research says that since May, art and collectibles NFTs have not made more than $100 million in sales each week. In August of last year, nearly $1 billion worth of the same kind of NFTs were sold in just one week.

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