This week, campus gaming startup AcadArena successfully raised $3.5 million in seed funding, led by Europe’s premier blockchain fund for early-stage crypto 1KX, with participants including Hashed, a global early-stage venture fund for blockchain and crypto pioneers, and Kevin Lin, co-founder of live-streaming giant Twitch. With that funding, AcadArena is looking to pioneer entirely new applications for blockchain technology towards perfecting their model for campus gaming communities.
“Being supported and mentored by some of the people who built the things we grew up with is really humbling,” said Justin Banusing, AcadArena’s chief operating officer. “Not only does it give us the confidence that we’re on the right path, but we’re being mentored by people who’ve already done it. It’s dope to be able to talk to these people and have them invest not just their money, but also their time. It’s a really heartwarming thing.”
According to the latest data from Statista, Southeast Asia’s gaming market was valued at $4.59 billion in 2020, accounting only for the region’s six largest sectors (Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Singapore). Mordor Intelligence forecasts the regional market to grow at a cumulative annual growth rate of 8.5%, amounting to $6.9 billion by 2025.
Founded in 2019 by Iloilo-born Banusing and co-CEOs Ariane Lim and Kevin Hoang, AcadArena caters specifically to the massive campus gaming sector—referring to esports on the collegiate level. This spans competitions, streaming, commentating, as well as support services like team management, coaching, and marketing. “Basically, we help students turn their passion for video games into something they can build a career on,” Banusing said.
They do this by providing support programs, access to competitions, and organizational assistance to students looking to build meaningful communities around the booming gaming industry. Today, the startup has grown their ecosystem to about 150,000 students across over 500 Philippine schools.
Earlier this year, AcadArena launched their Play-to-Grad program, an iteration of the rising Play-to-Earn model sweeping across the gaming industry. In this program, AcadArena invests in qualifying students, giving them the resources they need to play lucrative NFT games and earn money towards paying their school tuition fees. It’s a program that’s been well-received across their campuses, by both students and administrators alike.
“At the end of the day, one of the core metrics of these schools is making sure students are able to stay in school and ultimately graduate,” Banusing said. “We’re also entering an age wherein a lot of school administrators are actually people who grew up with video games. So we tell them ‘imagine that thing you grew up playing, we’re actually turning it into something you can pay your way through college with, to build a future for yourself.’ It hasn’t been very difficult to get their support. We’re pretty thankful for that.”
Pioneering new models for community-building
While the gaming industry has grown exponentially over the past few years, it’s AcadArena’s venture into NFT games, along with their plans to pioneer new applications for blockchain technology that’s garnered international attention from crypto funds like 1KX and Hashed.
In the coming year, AcadArena is looking to formalize many of their existing programs, like Play-to-Grad, into a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO). As the name suggests, DAOs are digital organizations whose rules and governance are embedded into their code, eliminating the need for managers or any sort of central governance. Membership in these communities is established by having a digital token—in AcadArena’s case, their proprietary AA token—which gives holders a vote on how its programs are run.
Simply put, AcadArena wants to gamify the college experience for their campus communities, rewarding active members with more of these digital tokens. It’s a logical evolution for the startup’s grassroots model, which has achieved much of its growth so far by empowering student champions across hundreds of campuses. As part of this DAO, these AA token-holding members become genuine owners of their communities. Meanwhile, AcadArena (the company) would also own a part of that DAO, managing its day-to-day support operations.
According to Banusing, this means that the student leaders that invest their time and efforts into their community will not only benefit from its support programs and the experiences that come with it, but will also have something concrete to show for it at the end of their college lives: AA tokens. Using them, alums can continue participating in AcadArena’s programs after graduating, or might simply choose to profit off of selling them.
“All the time you put into this ecosystem, into building this community in school, could actually translate into something with an actual financial return for you later on.”
With their seed round successfully closed, AcadArena will be putting their $3.5 million towards scaling Play-to-Grad, expanding their team, and investing in the programs that will continue driving growth.
While their roadmap may see the startup expanding into other regional markets as early as the end of 2022, Banusing says their team is in no rush to scale beyond the Philippines. “We’ve already done a couple of collaborative projects in places like Singapore, laying the groundwork towards expanding to other Southeast Asian countries,” he said. “But it’s all about timing. It doesn’t make sense to expand if we haven’t covered all the ground that needs to be covered here.”
“We want to make sure that our Philippine operations don’t suffer from expanding too quickly,” he said. “Because at the end of the day, all of this is in service to the community.”