November 12, 2021

Why We’re Investing in Forte

We are excited to partner with Forte, the leading blockchain gaming technology platform. Forte provides game developers the ability to integrate blockchain technology into both new and existing games to enable true ownership of digital assets — and we are investing to accelerate that future.

Kora is leading Forte’s Series B alongside Sea Capital, the corporate venture capital arm of global gaming and technology leader Sea Limited; blockchain partners Cosmos, Solana, and Polygon; technology funds Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Griffin Gaming Partners, and Tiger Global; and a number of other top gaming and digital media publishers. In total, Forte has raised $725 million of incremental capital since its last round to build on its vision for blockchain gaming.

Forte is uniquely placed to capitalize on the Web3 paradigm shift in gaming — a transition to play-to-earn.

We share Forte Co-Founder/CEO Josh Williams’s vision for how gaming will evolve during the next age of blockchain and digital asset ownership.

Forte’s platform allows game publishers to enable features such as seamless, embeddable token wallets, NFT minting and selling, payment rails, and other services built specifically for blockchain token economies and the management of digital and virtual assets.

Blockchain technology now makes it possible for any gamer to gain true property rights over digital assets and participate in liquid markets. Forte is building the blockchain operating system for games, enabling new economic behaviors and supporting the paradigm shift in gaming from Web2 to Web3. We believe that empowering players with true digital ownership will revolutionize game design and monetization models.

Forte is building the blockchain operating system for games.

In our view, Forte has built a complete set of technologies, tools, and services to lower the barriers to entry for integrating blockchain technology into games. The result has been partnerships with 40+ top game developers that are already building on the Forte platform including Gallium Studios, founded by legendary The Sims designer Will Wright. Forte’s full-stack solution is architected from the ground up to be easy to use, fully compliant, and interoperable with multiple blockchains.

Forte’s technology enables two new categories of behaviors that were previously not possible. First, the ability to take digital goods historically siloed in a given game and, by conferring ownership, to then allow them to become digital assets. Second, to empower emergent economic activities that are allowed for and permissioned by publishers. This empowers a transition from publisher-to-consumer economies to consumer-to-consumer activities, which Forte calls community economics. Taken together these allow for robust, diversified economies within games and also interoperability across them. We believe this technology platform can as a result unlock significant monetization potential.

We are investing in Forte to accelerate the development and adoption of technologies that enable new blockchain-based in-game economies.

Forte enables the next generation of games — and thus the blockchain evangelism of the general population. Its technology unlocks the financial upside of participating within gaming ecosystems, transforming entertainment into personal value creation. We have only now begun to witness the virality and financial opportunity made possible by new blockchain-based games, and are excited to continue to support Josh and his team.

We believe the blockchain evolution of gaming is here and now.

Blockchain technology for gaming is early, but we believe it can provide the first truly scaled use case for blockchain. More than merely crypto expanding gaming, gaming will expand crypto. This investment is therefore about more than video game development — it’s about creating new technology-driven economic opportunities for billions of people around the world.

Disclosures

The information presented in the above post is provided for informational purposes and is intended to provide an update concerning Kora Management LP (together with its affiliates, “Kora”) and an investment made by one of the funds Kora manages (the “Fund”) and does not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to purchase any securities, including those of the Fund. Any such offer or solicitation may be made only by means of the delivery of a confidential offering memorandum, which will contain material information not included herein regarding, among others, risks, and potential conflicts of interest.

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