TinyTap, a Tel Aviv, Israel-based EdTech company empowering users to create different educational game-based activities, has raised $8.5 million in a funding round led by Sequoia China, with participation from Polygon, Shima Capital, Liberty City Ventures, Kingsway Capital, and GameFi Ventures. With the latest investment round, the company, a subsidiary of the blockchain gaming platform Animoca Brands, plans to accelerate its product development and hire more staff.
Co-founded by Yogev Shelly, Uri Lazar, and Nissim Pinto in 2012, TinyTap aims to empower families, teachers and students to learn from each other by creating their personalized learning apps and playing thousands of new ones shared daily by a worldwide community of educators and learners worldwide. The platform offers user-generated educational content, dubbing itself “the world’s largest library of games by teachers. It has a library of over 250,000 educational games in 24 languages created by teachers and publishers.
Speaking about the fundraising, Co-founder of Animoca, Yat Siu, said in a statement:
NFTs make it possible for teachers to “better generate equity from their work and link up with co-publishers who can handle the promotion of their courses, all while offering students enhanced learning materials. Teachers and educators are among society’s most essential content creators and contributors, yet their wages typically do not reflect their critical importance. This is why we’re incredibly excited at the Web3 opportunities TinyTap is exploring in education.
According to Shelly, the firm was supposed to secure the fundraiser last year, but the uncertainty in the cryptocurrency market halted the effort.
The latest funding comes less than a year after Animoca Brands acquired an 84% stake in TinyTap for around $39 million. The startup started raising funds for the round in October 2022, closing it in February this year after some investors backed out in the wake of the FTX’s collapse.
Since Animoca’s acquisition, the startup has been doubling down on expanding Web3 education. It also began implementing blockchain technology into the platform, adding tokenized content through non-fungible token (NFT) collections. Animoca is one of the most prominent investors in the Web3 space today. Backed by Temasek Holdings and True Global Ventures (TGV), the Hong Kong-based venture capital firm launched a $2 billion Web3 fund last year. The company has invested in more than 300 startups, some of which have achieved immense success in the Web3 and NFT spaces, such as Dapper Labs, OpenSea, and Axie Infinity game creator Sky Mavis, among others.
