Investing in Irreverent Labs

It just so happened that on the first afternoon I met the Irreverent Labs team, I was having a pretty miserable day. I had way too many calls scheduled, and due to a set of unusual circumstances, I was working out of a hotel bathroom. 

I was also unclear on what exactly they were building, as the team had been very secretive ahead of the call. Some sort of chicken game? Sounded weird. I did not have high expectations. 

I could not have been more wrong. Fifteen minutes into the call, my mood had completely turned, and I was laughing hard. Rahul and David managed to convey in a short window that they were a serious, capable team, and also that they had an incredible sense of humor and no qualms about baking it into the product. In other words, they take their fun very seriously. 

The ability to thoroughly delight users in a ridiculous and unexpected way is a lost art, and one that the aptly-named Irreverent Labs captures in spades. As it did with me, their quirky sense of humor has really struck a nerve with the community at large, as seen in their thriving Discord.

We’ve loved to see the energy of that community, which isn’t just chatting: it’s also building. In crypto, lore is an incredibly important part of building a community. It mostly comes down to storytelling, and an audience that is engaged enough to extend the original storyline further than what was originally put forth by the core team. It’s a defining characteristic of the richest, most engaging forms of media, which can now be powered by web3 rails. Irreverent Labs’ mission is to reinvent how games are played and built, using advanced ML models and a series of mini games that live in a persistent world, rather than a single monolithic game. 

Irreverent Labs’ Mecha Fight Club is a universe full of compelling, interconnected stories, and iconic, beautiful 3D art. The premise is outlandish: robotic roosters and hens battle it out in a hilarious combat sport that is part MMA, part Tamagotchi, part Gundam Wing, part Mortal Kombat, with a twist of humor from Family Guy, Monty Python and South Park. Every character in the game is an individually unique, artificially intelligent non-player-character (NPC) that exists on Solana as an NFT. 

For all its lighthearted fun, Irreverent Labs is a deep technology company building advanced tech on top of a futuristic mecha-cockfighting game. The software they’re building is unique, and combined with the web3 economy they plan to launch in the coming months, will allow all kinds of creators, from artists to musicians to engineers, to play a role in further developing the game and storyline. We couldn’t be more excited to lead Irreverent Labs’ Series A. 

See you in the Cocktagon!

***