Yuga Labs Sparks a Wild Comeback Bid With Otherside and a New CEO

Yuga Labs became a household name in crypto by selling cartoon apes for hundreds of thousands of dollars each. Four years later, the company is still standing while most of its NFT-era peers have quietly disappeared, and it just handed the CEO job to a new leader for the third time since 2022.

That kind of turnover would sink most startups. For Yuga Labs, it’s almost become part of the story. This guide breaks down who actually runs the company, what it’s worth, where its revenue comes from now, and what it’s like to work there, using current reporting instead of recycled 2022 headlines.

What Is Yuga Labs

Yuga Labs, Inc. is the Web3 company behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club, one of the most recognizable non-fungible token collections ever created. Since its 2021 launch, the company has expanded well beyond a single NFT drop into a broader portfolio of digital collectibles, a cryptocurrency, and an ambitious metaverse platform called Otherside.

The company is headquartered in Coral Gables, Florida, and operates primarily on the Ethereum blockchain, though parts of its ecosystem now touch other chains and platforms as well. Yuga Labs LLC is the parent entity behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club, Mutant Ape Yacht Club, CryptoPunks, Meebits, ApeCoin, and Otherside brands, as outlined in its Crunchbase profile.

What makes Yuga Labs different from most crypto projects is longevity. Plenty of NFT companies launched in 2021, cashed out, and vanished. Yuga Labs is still shipping products in 2026, even after brutal NFT price declines, multiple rounds of layoffs, and three CEO changes in four years.

Yuga Labs Founders

Yuga Labs was started in early 2021 by four friends, all of whom initially operated under pseudonyms borrowed from pop culture and literature.

Greg Solano, who went by “Gargamel,” and Wylie Aronow, who went by “Gordon Goner,” are widely described as the creative and strategic leads. According to Wikipedia’s entry on Bored Ape, the two grew up together in Miami and bonded over a shared love of author David Foster Wallace before turning their attention to crypto. Solano worked as a writer and editor, while Aronow, the son of speedboat racing legend Donald Aronow, came to the project after years as a cryptocurrency trader.

Zeshan Ali (“No Sass”) and Kerem Atalay (“Emperor Tomato Ketchup”) handled the technical side. Both studied computer science at the same university as Solano, and both wrote their first lines of Solidity, the programming language used for Ethereum smart contracts, only months before Bored Ape Yacht Club launched.

In February 2022, BuzzFeed News publicly identified Solano and Aronow, ending their anonymity. Ali and Atalay came forward with their own names shortly afterward. Since then, three of the four founders have stepped back from day-to-day operations at various points, while Solano has remained the most consistently visible figure tied to the company’s leadership.

Who Owns Yuga Labs

Yuga Labs is a privately held company, so there’s no public stock ticker and no single “owner” in the way a publicly traded company would have one. Ownership is split between the founding team, company management, and outside investors who bought equity in the 2022 funding round.

The company’s most prominent institutional investor is Andreessen Horowitz, commonly known as a16z, which led a $450 million raise in March 2022 and placed general partner Christopher Lyons on Yuga Labs’ board. Other investors from that round include Animoca Brands, MoonPay, and Coinbase Ventures, according to startup funding tracker data. No single outside investor holds majority control, and the founding team and management retain significant equity.

Yuga Labs CEO History and Leadership

If you’re searching for “Yuga Labs CEO,” the honest answer depends on when you’re asking, because the role has changed hands three times.

• Nicole Muniz served as Yuga Labs’ first CEO, guiding the company through its explosive early growth in 2021 and most of 2022.
• Daniel Alegre, a former Chief Operating Officer at Activision Blizzard with more than 16 years at Google before that, took over in December 2022, as first reported by TechCrunch. Alegre was brought in specifically to professionalize the company and push its gaming ambitions forward through Otherside. He lasted about 10 months, overseeing a wave of layoffs in October 2023 before departing in early 2024.
• Greg Solano, the co-founder known as Garga, then stepped back into the CEO seat in February 2024, according to The Block. Solano was blunt about the company’s struggles at the time, telling staff in a message reported by Decrypt that Yuga had “lost its way” and needed to become smaller and more focused.
• Michael Figge is Yuga Labs’ current CEO as of April 2026. Figge isn’t a new face at the company. He joined Yuga Labs in 2021 and had been serving as chief product officer before the promotion, after earlier stints as chief content officer and chief creative officer. Solano moved into the chairman of the board role, saying, per The Block’s report on the transition, that he wanted to return to creative work rather than day-to-day management.

Figge has framed his priority as growing Otherside’s user base and proving the platform can work as “a world-class social platform for digital ownership and crypto.” Given his multi-year track record building Otherside specifically, his appointment reads less like a shakeup and more like a formalization of who was already driving the product.

Yuga Labs Valuation

Yuga Labs’ most recent formal valuation dates back to March 2022, when its $450 million funding round from Andreessen Horowitz and other investors valued the company at $4 billion, making it one of the highest-valued private companies to ever emerge from the NFT space.

That valuation has never been officially updated in a subsequent priced round, which matters because a lot has changed since 2022. Bored Ape Yacht Club floor prices have fallen more than 90 percent from their 2022 peak, and the broader NFT market has cooled dramatically. Because Yuga Labs hasn’t raised new outside capital at a new valuation since 2022, the $4 billion figure is best understood as a historical benchmark rather than a current market price.

Third-party data providers like Crunchbase and Tracxn still list the $4 billion figure as the company’s latest known valuation, which is accurate but dated. Anyone quoting a different, more current number without a specific funding announcement to point to is likely speculating.

Yuga Labs Funding

Yuga Labs has raised a total of roughly $750 million across its funding history, though the vast majority of that came from three distinct events rather than a traditional multi-round venture path.

The company’s seed round closed in March 2022 for $450 million, led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from investors including Animoca Brands, Coinbase Ventures, MoonPay, and several other funds, per TechCrunch’s coverage. That remains Yuga Labs’ only priced equity round to date.

Beyond that equity raise, Yuga Labs has generated significant capital through token and NFT sales rather than traditional fundraising. The ApeCoin initial distribution in March 2022 and the Otherside land sale in April 2022, which brought in more than $300 million in a single day, functioned as major capital events even though they weren’t structured as venture funding rounds.

Yuga Labs Revenue

Yuga Labs doesn’t publish detailed audited financials the way a public company would, but pieces of its revenue picture have come out over the years through reporting and company statements.

In 2021, its first year of operation, Yuga Labs reportedly generated around $137 million in revenue, driven almost entirely by primary Bored Ape Yacht Club sales and the standard 2.5 percent royalty on secondary market trades.

The company’s biggest single revenue event came in 2022 with the Otherside land sale, which brought in roughly $317 million in a matter of hours from the sale of virtual land plots called Otherdeeds, as reported at the time by Fortune. Secondary trading of those Otherdeeds NFTs has since generated several hundred million dollars more in royalty revenue, according to OpenSea data.

More recent revenue has shifted toward brand partnerships, licensing, and Otherside-related sales rather than pure NFT speculation. The company’s 2025 ApeFest event in Las Vegas included a partnership with Amazon Gaming to sell co-branded digital avatars, as Decrypt reported, a sign that Yuga Labs is trying to diversify revenue beyond royalties on apes that trade far below their original prices.

What Is Otherside and Why It Matters Now

Otherside is Yuga Labs’ long-delayed answer to the question of what happens after you’ve sold every ape you can sell. Announced in 2022, it’s designed as a persistent virtual world where Bored Ape, Mutant Ape, and CryptoPunk NFTs can exist as playable characters, alongside quests, social spaces, and creator tools.

The project has had a rocky development path. Early land sales generated hundreds of millions of dollars, but actual gameplay lagged for years behind the hype, contributing to two rounds of layoffs in 2023, documented by Blockworks and Decrypt, as the company restructured around a more focused Otherside roadmap.

That patience appears to be paying off, at least in terms of shipping. In late 2025, Yuga Labs launched the Koda Nexus, described as the social hub at the center of Otherside, alongside a partnership with Amazon Gaming to promote a co-branded NFT character to Amazon’s massive user base, according to Decrypt’s launch coverage. Yuga Labs’ leadership described the goal as building an interoperable, gamified world combining elements familiar from platforms like Roblox and Fortnite with blockchain-based ownership.

Whether Otherside can meaningfully move the needle on Yuga Labs’ business depends on user adoption, something that’s historically been the hardest part of any metaverse project, Yuga’s included.

Yuga Labs Careers and Jobs

Yuga Labs has grown from its original four-person founding team to more than 100 employees, and it continues to post openings across engineering, game production, community management, and creative roles. Current listings can be tracked on job boards like web3.career.

Compensation for public listings has ranged widely depending on seniority and specialty, with reported salary bands anywhere from around $75,000 for entry-level community and social roles up to $275,000 or more for senior engineering and leadership positions. Most roles are remote-friendly, though the company maintains a presence in Florida, New York, and Los Angeles.

If you’re considering applying, a few things are worth knowing going in:

• The company has been through multiple restructurings since 2022, so team stability has varied by department and by year.
• Otherside-related roles, including game production, live operations, and community management, have made up a significant share of recent postings as the metaverse push accelerates.
• Yuga Labs has publicly emphasized wanting candidates from non-traditional backgrounds, particularly for web3-specific roles where formal experience is still relatively rare.

Yuga Labs’ Broader Portfolio

Beyond Bored Ape Yacht Club, Yuga Labs owns and operates several other well-known projects that are worth understanding if you’re researching the company as a whole.

• Mutant Ape Yacht Club launched in 2021 as a companion collection created through a serum mechanic that let Bored Ape holders mutate their apes into new characters.
• CryptoPunks and Meebits, two of the earliest and most historically significant NFT collections, were acquired by Yuga Labs from Larva Labs in March 2022, consolidating much of the NFT market’s most valuable intellectual property under one roof.
• ApeCoin is the ERC-20 token that powers much of the Yuga ecosystem, including Otherside land purchases. ApeCoin is technically governed by the independent ApeCoin DAO rather than Yuga Labs directly, though Yuga remains its most influential ecosystem partner.

The company has also acquired smaller players over time, including the NFT marketplace PROOF in early 2024, while divesting some gaming assets, such as HV-MTL and Legends of Mara, to studio Faraway that same year as part of its push to focus resources on Otherside specifically, as detailed by industry tracker sp-edge.

Yuga Labs Compared to Other NFT and Web3 Companies

Yuga Labs still sits at the top of most NFT-related rankings by total funding raised and brand recognition, largely because Bored Ape Yacht Club became a genuine cultural phenomenon, with sales and partnerships including brands like Adidas, Gucci, and Rolling Stone at its peak.

That said, the comparison that matters most in 2026 isn’t to other NFT projects, most of which never came close to Yuga’s scale. It’s to other metaverse and gaming platforms. Otherside is now effectively competing for user attention against established gaming ecosystems and other blockchain-based virtual worlds, a much tougher and more crowded field than the NFT art market it grew out of.

For readers tracking how blockchain gaming and digital ownership platforms are evolving more broadly, see PurelyTechHub’s coverage of emerging tech companies for context on how other players in this space are positioning themselves.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who founded Yuga Labs?

Yuga Labs was founded in 2021 by Greg Solano and Wylie Aronow, who initially went by the pseudonyms Gargamel and Gordon Goner, along with Zeshan Ali and Kerem Atalay, who handled the technical development.

Who is the CEO of Yuga Labs?

As of April 2026, Michael Figge is CEO of Yuga Labs. He replaced co-founder Greg Solano, who moved into the chairman of the board role. Figge previously served as the company’s chief product officer.

Who owns Yuga Labs?

Yuga Labs is privately owned by its founders, management team, and outside investors, with Andreessen Horowitz as its most prominent institutional backer following a $450 million investment in 2022.

What is Yuga Labs’ current valuation?

The company’s last publicly disclosed valuation was $4 billion, set during its March 2022 funding round. It has not announced a new priced valuation since then.

How much revenue does Yuga Labs make?

Yuga Labs generated an estimated $137 million in 2021 and brought in more than $300 million from the Otherside land sale alone in 2022. More recent revenue has shifted toward brand partnerships and Otherside-related sales as NFT trading volume has declined industry-wide.

Does Yuga Labs have open jobs?

Yes. Yuga Labs regularly posts openings across engineering, game development, community management, and creative roles, with most positions open to remote candidates in the United States.

What is Otherside?

Otherside is Yuga Labs’ metaverse platform, designed as a persistent virtual world where Bored Ape, Mutant Ape, and CryptoPunk NFTs can function as playable characters. It launched its Koda Nexus social hub in late 2025 after several years of development.

The Bottom Line

Yuga Labs has outlasted the NFT hype cycle that made it famous, which is more than most of its 2021 peers can say. Three CEOs, two rounds of layoffs, and a 90 percent drop in Bored Ape prices later, the company is still building, still hiring, and still betting that Otherside can turn a speculative NFT audience into a lasting gaming and digital ownership platform.

Whether that bet works depends on something the NFT boom never had to prove: real, sustained user engagement over the long run.