What the business is
Irreverent Labs is a Seattle gaming startup building AI-driven games whose characters live on blockchain rails.
The bet
That traditional gamers will come around to owning the characters they raise over time — 'the ideal future Tamagotchi' — inside a play-to-earn economy on Solana.
Starting capital
$5M seed led by Andreessen Horowitz in November 2021, with Chainsmokers Mantis VC, Unlock Venture Partners, Keen Crypto and Advancit Capital participating.
How it started
Longtime entrepreneur Rahul Sood, who previously co-founded esports betting startup Unikrn and headed up Microsoft's VC arm, started Irreverent Labs with David Raskino, who helped lead Microsoft's VC fund with Sood and was most recently a director of engineering at Microsoft. The startup raised its a16z-led $5M seed in November 2021.
What happened
On January 20, 2022 the studio revealed MechaFightClub, set to release that spring: players trade, sell and fight unique chicken-esque 'mechabots' that live on the Solana blockchain, earning a play-to-earn currency called nuggets that can be spent in-game or withdrawn to the wider Solana ecosystem. Raskino described procedural storylines and an 'automated Netflix' future where people watch the game as much as play it, and framed gaming becoming 'a legitimate form of work' as machines displace labor.
What has to be true
It is a clear, dated bet on NFT gaming at the peak of the 2021-22 crypto-gaming window, made by founders with Microsoft and Unikrn track records.
The differentiators are specific: unique AI-raised characters on Solana, a two-way in-game/withdrawable currency, and procedural storytelling.
a16z's participation — 50+ crypto startups and a reported $4.5B crypto fundraise — places the bet in the industry-wide moment.
What can be applied
Inside a hype cycle the real wager is behavioral, not financial: Sood was betting that ownership gets sticky once players form a relationship with a character they raised.
Aftermath
As of 2022-01-20 MechaFightClub was announced for a spring 2022 release, with the $5M a16z-led seed in hand and the studio positioning its mechabots as the future of the Tamagotchi-style bond between player and character.
FOLLOW THE EVIDENCE