Animoca's Yat Siu Eyes Billion-Dollar Business from Agentic AI Venue

Siu likes to position himself as a follower of the trends he opines on and as a user of the products he invests in. He told Sandmark he now personally relies on 300 agents, up from 200 a few months ago, and earns $600-$1000 a month from a skill he built on Minds. The emerging income generated by an undisclosed number of users offers an early glimpse of the creator economy the Hong Kong-based firm is trying to build around autonomous software.

Creating digital actors

Minds is still small by consumer-internet standards, Siu said in an 18 Aug interview with Sandmark. However, it's targeting hundreds of thousands of users who are reimaging tool-like AI agents into digital actors that can earn, transact and eventually manage parts of users' financial and everyday lives. Minds enables users to deploy continuously operating AI agents without managing infrastructure, with features such as memory and agent coordination. Animoca said the platform is intended to simplify development and expand access to AI tools as adoption of autonomous systems increases. 

"I earn between $600 to $1000 a month on Minds, which is relatively small, but it is something that I don't do very actively," Siu said, speaking at the firm's new sleek, open-concept headquarters on the 28th floor of Landmark South in the southern Wong Chuk Hang district of Hong Kong. "I build a skill; [and] other people use it. But we only have a small number of users, comparatively speaking...We're running towards hundreds of thousands of users, but it's still small in scale of the world...we want this to be a billion-dollar business."

A skill is a learned behaviour, capability or defined playbook of instructions that teaches an AI agent exactly how to orchestrate multiple tools into a coherent workflow. On Minds, it is a core, legally and tradeable digital commodity that is packaged, given a unique platform ID and listed on an open marketplace where it can be rented, bought or equipped by other users' agents.

Sandmark has asked Animoca whether the user number refers to registered, active or paying users; how many skills generate revenue in the platform; and whether Siu's monthly income from the platform represents gross revenue, net proceeds or a recurring run rate. While the company declined to give details, it had stated on 6 Aug that Minds has "thousands of users worldwide". Meanwhile, Samuel Tse, who is head of investments, partnerships and advisory, referred to more than 10,000 "beta users" in a social media post in early August. 

Ecosystem investment

In the prior month, the Minds platform processed monthly volume of 936bn inference tokens. OpenRouter, which tracks traffic across AI applications, listed Minds among the most-used and fastest-growing personal agent platforms. It ranks third in the category behind Hermes Agent and OpenClaw – independent, open-source AI agent frameworks that enable agents to perform tasks and interact with other software, running on the background of the new agentic web.

Minds is also among the highest-ranked applications in OpenRouter's creative and roleplay categories, although it sits 15th in the marketplace's overall ranking.  

Animoca, which has an investment portfolio of more than 600 digital asset companies, signalled on 5 May that Minds was becoming a commercial ecosystem initiative rather than an in-house tool, when it rolled out $10mn in funding for early-stage ventures operating on the platform.

Siu acknowledged that the field for agentic AI programmes is getting crowded and competitive but asserted that Animoca was an early mover and has been over its history. True to its gaming roots, Animoca sees a differentiator for Minds as bringing a gamified and social experience to users instead of being just a productivity tool.

Competitive landscape

Siu contrasts Minds with personal AI agent platforms in the US, which he said typically run locally on users' machines or through business services. In his view, Minds is aiming for something different: agents that behave more like "metaversal beings" that come to the user, rather than simply personal assistants running in the background.

What remains unclear about Minds is the operating picture behind that growth: active users, retention, paid conversion, the number of skills and active creators, transaction volume, creator earnings, take rate and inference costs.

Siu, who was born and raised in Vienna, studied music and moved to Hong Kong in the early 1990s. He is regarded by some as an influential Web3 advocate and has been a prominent voice in the city's push to develop the sector. He said the latest initiative stays true to Animoca's mission of promoting an open metaverse and digital property rights.

While the original vision endured, the setting did not. In 2024, Animoca left its cramped, decade-long quarters in Cyberport, decamping around 150 employees to the the 27th and 28th floors of the office designed and built by Envisone Studio. A bright blue neon corporate signage welcomes visitors to the building, which opens directly into the firm's office. Spanning 28,000 square feet, the 28th floor also hosts a large pantry that doubles as an event space.

Siu, who was involved in Hong Kong's early internet sector, sees the latest iteration of the web developing quickly. Asked when agentic AI could become mainstream for individuals and businesses, he said: "Two years. [It's] going to happen very fast... and it's going to be one of those things where... it just shoots up."

Trust barrier

What stands in the way to wider adoption is not systems' capability but "a trust issue," he said.  "If I'm not familiar [with AI agents], it's hard to do... I think the inevitability will come when the competitive pressure comes. If my friend is doing a lot more, or my contact or my business rival is doing so much better because he's using AI, then I have to use it too."

For Animoca, offering Minds provides a plausible route from being a Web3 holding company and investor to owning a recurring-revenue layer in the agent economy. The total value of agents operating worldwide could reach $234bn by 2034 according to a report by the World Economic Forum, a policy and networking organizsation. The total impact of the agentic economy on productivity could extend to trillions of dollars, according to McKinsey, a consultancy.

While many companies and startups have raced to develop and promote the use of AI agents, the stakes for Animoca, founded in 2014 by Siu and former Softbank partner David Kim, are high as it approaches a potential public listing on the Nasdaq stock exchange. Kim was Animoca's original executive chairman, a title that Siu now holds. Animoca - a portmanteau for "Animation, Mobile and Capital" - was spun out of Siu's technology incubator Outblaze to pool together mobile gaming properties and tech investments.

Ahead of the planned public listing that could value the firm at $1bn, Minds may also give investors another way to assess the business. A platform with users, developer activity, transaction flows and fee-generating potential could be valued differently from a crypto group whose fortunes remain materially tied to digital asset markets through token reserves, portfolio holdings and Web3 businesses.

Public listing

Advisory services have become Animoca's largest reported source of bookings as it expands into AI agent infrastructure. Siu declined to comment on whether the Nasdaq listing via a reverse merger with Singapore-based fintech Currenc Group (Nasdaq: CURR) is still on track for the third quarter.

If successful, the listing would return the firm back to the public stock markets after being delisted from the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) in 2020 due to regulatory friction regarding crypto activities.

"Animoca absolutely wants to be a public company. The drive for that is important. It's not just for shareholders. It's for our standing as a company. It's for what it means," Siu said.