Play-to-earn (P2E) game company AAG Ventures (AAGV) has raised $12.5 million in a private funding round led by Shima Capital, Tribe Capital and Tess Ventures. The funding will help AAGV launch its P2E platform supporting external gaming guilds, as well as a new learn-to-earn platform that AAGV says is the first of its kind.

HashKey Capital, Republic Realm and Sancor Capital were among the other backers in the crowded round. Participating angel investors included Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal and David Wang of SoftBank’s Latin America fund. Backers from the gaming industry included Vulcan Forged and Sipher.

Founded four months ago in Singapore, AAGV launched the P2E gaming guild Achip & Achair Guild (AAG) that the company says has attracted 2,000 players, or “scholars,” in the Philippines and six other developing countries.

AAGV now plans to launch a platform that helps other P2E guilds engage players at scale, and a learn-to-earn platform where players earn crypto while learning transferable skills such as math or programming. The company plans to launch beta versions of both platforms during the first half of 2022. AAGV aims to onboard 100 million people onto the metaverse economy by 2030.

“We think the best chance for us to get to 100 million scholars is by cooperating and enabling other guilds rather than competing with them,” said AAGV co-founder and CEO Jack Vinijtrongjit. “We imagine that in five to 10 years that there are 10,000 guilds with at least 10,000 players each and a software platform will be foundational to that happening.”