Tencent Exec To Join Animoca Brands As CBO
- Tencent’s Liu Jiaming has joined Animoca Brands as CBO
- He resigned from Tencent on July 15
The chairman of the 2010-launched leading Chinese microblogging website Tencent Weibo, Liu Jiaming, officially resigned from his position in the company on July 15 and is now reportedly joining Hong Kong-based mobile game development company Animoca Brands.
As per a report by a local media channel Jiemian News, Jiaming will “soon” join Animoca Brands as Chief Business Officer (CBO) to manage all subsidiaries of the company.
Tencent also confirmed the departure of Jiamingto Jiemian News and revealed that he resigned from the executive director position at the company for personal reasons. Notably, for now, the company’s CEO and general manager since 2020, Zhou Kejun, has reportedly presided over the executive director position in the company.
Liu Jiaming had previously worked as an investment banking analyst at Citibank and a partner at McKinsey & Company. He joined Tencent Weibo in 2016 and was handling an Internet insurance business. He reportedly set the development direction in the early stages, formed a team, and applied for an insurance agent license for the company.
According to the report, Jiaming is now aiming to work as the Chief Business Officer (CBO) at gaming company Animoca Brands. He will be reportedly responsible for managing all of its over 300 acquisitions and investment companies, along with taking the lead in mergers, acquisitions, and foreign cooperation.
Notably, the latest major funding for Animoca Brands happened on January 19, 2022, when it raised $359 million in a funding round led by Liberty City Ventures. The deal increased Animoca Brands’ valuation by more than doubling it to over $5 billion. Sequoia China, Soros Fund Management, Gemini Frontier Fund, Winklevoss Capital, and 10T Holdings were the other major participating investors.
Animoca Brands is a subsidiary of Animoca, a development and investment firm for chain games established in 2014 by renowned Hong Kong technology entrepreneur Yat Siu. After 2019, he shifted his interest to Web3 to become an NFT creator and metaverse game developer, and eventually established his own metaverse and games in The Sandbox.
Notably, neither Liu Jiaming nor Animcoa Brands have officially made any statements about the former’s joining as the latter’s CBO. However, if this report by the local Chinese newspaper is true, it would be interesting to see where Jiaming takes Animoca’s business.
A crypto journalist with over 3 years of experience in DeFi, NFT, metaverse, etc. Parth has worked with major media outlets in the crypto and finance world and has gained experience and expertise in crypto culture after surviving bear and bull markets over the years.
