Dapper Labs, the startup behind the fantasy basketball NFT sport – NBA Top Shot, has just announced that it has acquired Brud, a virtual influencer startup. The value of the acquisition deal was not revealed by the companies.
Dapper will get the whole 32-member team onboard. Trevor McFedries, the CEO of Brud, will run the new division called ‘Dapper Collective’. The focus of this new business will be to help communities develop DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations) through its Flow blockchain.
The Vancouver-based company, which was recently valued at 7.6 billion USD, will launch the required tools to let creators make DAOs more user-friendly and accessible to crypto users. Roham Gharegozlou, the chief executive of Dapper, said that they were impressed by the way in which Brud’s team had worked on Metaverse, an amorphous vision of connected virtual worlds.
Brud’s teamwork on digital social media influencer characters, particularly the fictional virtual celebrity Lil Miquela, was also commendable. The startup created many more players in this field, following which it grabbed the attention of many investors around three years ago. However, the virtual influencer field hasn’t experienced any explosive interest and has remained a niche field over the years.
Brud’s existing members will form the foundation of the new division, though the group is likely to expand further. The team has been given the creative autonomy to do what they are best at. However, they can depend on the knowledge and infrastructure of Dapper Labs as well for any assistance.
