Web3 technology companies received $7.1 billion in funding in 2022, with gaming, metaverse, and social networks as the most popular investment areas, as reported by Metaverse Post’s year-end report.
Metaverse Post’s report found that start-ups in gaming, metaverse, social networks, infrastructure, artificial reality, virtual reality (AR & VR), and artificial intelligence (AI) received a combined total of $7,169,997,888 in funding.
Even though the market was unfavorable, the funding total for 2022 was $4.8 billion higher than the previous year.
Gaming
The year’s top investment category was gaming, while the lowest was artificial intelligence.
Gaming was the most successful investment category, attracting $4.49 billion or 62.5% of the total investment in Web3.
According to the report, Epic Games received the largest amount of funding in 2022, raising $2 billion from investors including Sony and KIRKBI (the owner of LEGO). This helped the company achieve a valuation of $31.5 billion by the end of the year.
Metaverse
The metaverse category was the second most popular investment area in 2022, attracting $1.82 billion or 25.4% of the total investment, according to the report.
The creators of the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC), Yuga Labs, received the second-highest amount of funding in 2022. In March, the company raised $450 million to launch Otherside metaverse as was reported by Cryptoslate.
Social Networks
Investors showed strong interest in start-ups that developed social networking apps that were suitable for the decentralized and secure nature of Web3. These companies attracted $259.1 million in funding, representing 3.6% of the total investment in Web3.
Infrastructure, AR & VR, and AI
The remaining three categories, in descending order of funding received, were infrastructure ($200.8 million), AR&VR ($178.6 million), and AI ($136.5 million).
Several start-ups within the infrastructure category made the top 10 list for most funding received. These included Immutable ($200 million), focused on non-fungible tokens (NFTs), Improbable ($150 million), focused on the metaverse, Sky Mavis ($150 million), focused on gaming, and AngelList ($100 million), focused on start-ups in general. All of these companies fell under the infrastructure category.
Biggest Investors
Four venture capital firms were the biggest investors in Web3 in 2022, with each firm investing more than $1 billion. Paradigm was the top investing venture capital firm, spending $2.5 billion in 2022 and supporting 31 projects, such as Uniswap, Magic Eden, and Optimism.
Andreessen Horowitz was the second largest investor, with a total investment of $2.2 billion. The youngest venture capital firm, Hivemind, invested $1.5 billion and came in third place, while Binance Labs was the fourth largest investor with $1 billion in funding.
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