Yahaha, a Helsinki- and Shanghai-based immersive, user-generated, low-code gaming platform created by a group of Chinese gaming veterans, made waves in January announcing a cumulative $50 million in funding ahead of its alpha launch this April. Now, with 100,000 creators and hundreds of thousands of players, it's raised another $40 million to continue building out its product — specifically to bring in monetization features and more social hooks — as well as to hire more talent and for business development.

Yahaha is characterizing this as an extension of its prior round, rather than a true add-on, specifically a "Series A+." We are looking for a follow-on valuation update, and to put this in some context, when it announced the funding 11 months ago, I was told that the valuation was a "few hundred million" (so in the wide range of $300-500 million). Raise and valuation both stand out against a backdrop of slim fundraising, particularly for consumer startups. It has now raised $90 million to date.

Yahaha describes itself as a dual-headquartered firm, but in this round of fundraising, all its investors come from China and greater Asia.

Leading the investment are Singapore's Temasek and Alibaba, the Chinese internet giant; another Chinese company, 37 Interactive Entertainment, will also participate. Earlier, the company had raised funding from 5Y Capital, HillHouse, Coatue, ZhenFund, Bertelsmann Asia Investments, BiliBili and Xiaomi.

The firm is now employing over 150 people and has offices in Helsinki, Seoul and Shanghai. According to LinkedIn, which shut down operations in China last year, about half of the company's employees have signed up on its service and have listed their location as being from Shanghai.

Quite the hype surrounding the notion of "metaverse" of late, particularly during earlier portions of the year-that is, spearheaded in no small part by one of the biggest consumer internet businesses of our time, Facebook .

 quite a lot of which hasn't yet come to much-to-date-one big bellwether involving Meta itself knocking back an own-goal in its own efforts.

Though most of them concur that gaming has been one of the bright spots, as gamers are very eager to pay for and use hardware and software to enhance their experiences,

Yahaha is surfing a wave on top of another couple of big trends.

User-generated content has been a mainstream aspect of gaming and entertainment for quite some time now, but it has only recently taken on a much more business-like, sophisticated quality: people who, in the past, would have made media out of fun have now become "creators" that see economic value in building content and using them to reach audiences. But not all of those creators-not many of them, anyway, are "technical", so that is leading to attention (and funding) for companies that are building platforms to help creators create and spin up their business opportunities without a lot of heavy technical lifting.

And that's where Yahaha comes in. The company's founders — Chris Zhu (CEO), Pengfei Zhang (COO) and Hao Min (CTO) — all worked together as engineers at cross-platform gaming engine Unity — indeed Yahaha has been described to me as being built in partnership with Unity — and their low-code platform aims to do all that heavy lifting behind the scenes.

Looking to its creators and the businesses they are building, Zhu said the new features that the product will get will include more "monetization modules" and other business-related developments.

"We've seen fantastic growth in YAHAHA throughout the Early Alpha stage, and with over 100,000 creators signing up to make content with us, we are building on a strong foundation," Zhu said in a statement. This is the next step we are taking with YAHAHA, opening more creator experiences' monetization modules. We are pioneers, by investing in key areas of the community, building relations with brands that share our values as we continue to align ourselves with the experts from the realm of game development, 3D asset creation and so forth. So, of course, YAHAHA's not just bringing in the future of entertainment. It's actually supporting the next generation of creators and providing them with tools and an integrated virtual world platform for them to make great content. There are so many litany opportunities in that virtual world, and we want to be on the cutting edge of it with YAHAHA. To do this, it's imperative we continue investing in our team and in the community that got us to where we are right now."

But that growth comes with some significant questions. Will those noodling around in the early version stay with Yahaha as monetization comes in? Will that monetization work? Will the games being built be entertaining enough to get players to engage? Will "metaverse" evolve as a permanent player in the market, rather than a step of transition, when gamers advance to the next level? And that's before even considering some of the headaches that confront all UGC companies—moderation and censorship—and issues that confront companies out of China in particular as it relates to how data is hosted and handled generally.