Animoca’s Yat Siu: AI Agents Will Disrupt $900B Ads

In Miami, Animoca Brands co-founder Yat Siu announced a $10 million fund to invest in early-stage agentic artificial intelligence infrastructure. He predicted agentic AI will transform the $900 billion advertising market.

The program will target startups building tools that allow AI agents to act autonomously, transact, hold digital identity and interact without direct human prompts. Animoca described the focus as systems such as wallets, microtransaction services, machine control plane servers and command-line tools that let agents discover and act on services.

Siu compared the current stage of agentic AI to seed-stage investing in OpenAI and Anthropic about five years ago and identified December 2024 as when social agentic AI began gaining traction.

Siu predicted agents will reroute discovery and commerce away from centralized platforms to software that finds and buys on users’ behalf, and that blockchain networks will capture much of the discovery value because they let agents hold wallets, run microtransactions and establish digital identity outside app stores and social platforms.

On productivity and investing, Siu estimated ‘the productivity growth in AI is literally a 1,000x’ and advised retail investors to spread risk by holding 50 to 70 early-stage positions so a single large outcome could offset losses.

Addressing so-called ghost GDP – economic activity where agents transact without human input – Siu rejected the view that the activity lacks value, saying humans will create agents or offer goods and services that agents will want to buy, which can produce downstream demand and revenue.

On work, Siu predicted the highest-value workplace skill will shift from task execution to managing and orchestrating agents. ‘You’re hired because you can manage 10 agents well or 20 agents,’ he added, noting that people who can coordinate hundreds of agents will be in higher demand.

Animoca has invested in more than 620 companies across gaming, decentralized finance, non-fungible tokens and real-world assets. The company compared the current opportunity to its early bets on gaming and NFTs in 2021. Animoca did not disclose a timetable for investments or specific targets for the $10 million program.