Dapper Labs, developer of CryptoKitties, raises $11.2M from a16z, Warner Music Group, and others for its proof-of-stake, high transaction volume blockchain Flow
Now that Warner Music Group has mastered streaming, generating $2 billion in revenue from the technology, the music giant behind Cardi B …
Context & Ripple Effects
Dapper Labs has been raising at a steady cadence since spinning CryptoKitties out of Axiom Zen with a $12M Series A led by a16z and USV in early 2018, then closing a $15M round led by Venrock just months later. The new twist in this $11.2M raise is the investor mix: alongside repeat backer a16z sits Warner Music Group, which per the Forbes description has already generated $2 billion from streaming and brings label relationships rather than just capital.
That matters because it signals Dapper Labs' pivot from a single collectibles game into infrastructure — Flow, its own proof-of-stake blockchain built for high transaction volume, rather than another application riding on Ethereum like CryptoKitties did.
First-order effects
- Warner Music Group gains an equity stake in the rails a music company would need if it mints catalog, tickets, or fan assets on-chain — positioning itself ahead of rival labels rather than waiting for a third-party standard.
- Dapper Labs gets funding to finish Flow without depending on Ethereum, whose congestion CryptoKitties famously contributed to, freeing it to control throughput and fees for consumer-scale apps.
Second-order effects
- Other major rights holders face pressure to match Warner's move with their own blockchain investments or partnerships, turning entertainment IP into a bidding surface for emerging chains.
- a16z extends its pattern of backing successive Dapper vehicles across categories — a bet that later shows up in adjacent plays like Flowcarbon's carbon-credit trading raise and NFT music startup Sound — reinforcing its position as the default institutional investor for consumer crypto.
Third-order effects
- If media companies keep taking equity stakes in dedicated blockchains instead of deploying on shared ones, consumer crypto splits into vertically integrated ecosystems — each major IP owner aligned with its own chain — rather than one open settlement layer.
- The repeated spin-out model (game studio to platform company to token economy) suggests venture-backed consumer apps will increasingly launch proprietary chains once usage scales, reshaping how blockchain infrastructure gets funded and governed.
The trend: Entertainment incumbents are moving from licensing content onto existing blockchains to buying stakes in purpose-built ones, with a16z acting as the connective investor across each wave.