'Shrapnel' Game Studio Neon Machine Raises $20 Million Led by Polychain

Neon Machine, the Seattle-based game studio behind upcoming first-person shooter Shrapnel, has raised $20 million in Series A funding, the company announced Wednesday.

Polychain Capital led the round, with Griffin Gaming Partners, Brevan Howard Digital, Franklin Templeton, IOSG Ventures, and Tess Ventures also participating. 

The funds will be used to further develop Shrapnel at a “critical time,” according to a statement, as the game team prepares to ship an early-access version in December ahead of a full launch sometime in 2024. The Shrapnel team currently has over 70 employees, CEO Mark Long said in a statement.

“We had a collective dream to break the mold of the traditional game development cycle and design a blockbuster-quality shooter where players truly own and create game assets,” Long said.

Shrapnel is a sci-fi extraction shooter game where a substantial amount of in-game content—like weapon parts, weapons, and cosmetics—will be offered as NFTs on Shrapnel’s Avalanche subnet, which is a private crypto network built on Avalanche. Back in April, Shrapnel launched its own ERC-20 token, SHRAP, on its Avalanche network.

The free-to-play multiplayer game has plans for both solo and team-based gameplay. Shrapnel is also placing substantial emphasis on its user-generated content (UGC) potential and hopes to offer gamers the ability to generate their own game items using Shrapnel’s tech, which can then be minted as NFTs.

“It's exciting to witness the team at Shrapnel continue to propel forward towards gameplay while pushing the boundaries of player experience and ownership through blockchain technology,” said Polychain Capital Partner Josh Rosenthal in a statement.

“As a crypto-native fund, we're immensely excited about Shrapnel’s potential in leveraging blockchain to redefine the traditional extraction gameplay,” said IOSG Ventures Founding Partner Jocy Lin. 

Neon Machine first started as part of HBO Interactive. Since then, the studio spun out on its own, raised $10.5 million in seed funding in 2021, released comic books, and launched a PFP NFT collection last year. The Shrapnel maker has now raised a total of $37.5 million from its seed funding, Series A, and private token sale rounds.