Animoca Brands backs Minds with a $10M program for AI agent builders

Animoca Brands has launched Minds, a $10 million funding program to support early-stage teams building on its “Minds AI” agent platform, positioning AI agents as a new distribution layer that brands will have to design for.

The company shared the initiative alongside a broader push to make “always-on” agents easier to deploy and control without managing servers or hardware, and to encourage developers to build agents and “skills” that run on top of the platform.

Table of contents

Jump to each section:

• Why Minds is positioned as a platform, not a single assistant
• The strategic shift from ads to “invocations”
• From SEO to AEO: being findable to agents becomes the job
• What this means for marketers

Why Minds is positioned as a platform, not a single assistant

The most useful way to read Minds is not as “yet another AI agent,” but as an attempt to define a platform layer where agents and skills can be distributed like apps. Animoca Brands explicitly frames the ecosystem in App Store terms: agents become the platform, and skills become the apps built on top.

That framing matters because it shifts the competitive question. Instead of “whose agent is smartest,” the question becomes “whose platform attracts builders, and whose platform becomes the default environment where users delegate work.”

A few implications fall out of that:

• Always-on agents raise the bar for persistence. A chatbot session is easy to forget. An agent that learns preferences “in real time” becomes harder to swap out because it accumulates context.
• Infrastructure abstraction is the product. By emphasizing deployment without server or hardware management, Minds is selling operational simplicity as a growth lever.
• Funding is also a distribution tactic. A $10 million program that includes capital plus platform credits and technical support is a way to seed supply-side behavior: get teams building, then let users follow what gets built.

Strategic observation: When agents become platforms, “developer adoption” stops being a tech metric and becomes a marketing reality.

The strategic shift from ads to “invocations”

Minds also comes with a clear forecast: that a large advertising economy will increasingly compete with a transaction model where users pay for content through their agents, what Animoca Brands describes as an “invocation economy.”

The common assumption is that new interfaces simply add new ad slots. The contrasting reality is that agents are designed to reduce interruption, not create more of it. If an agent’s job is to get something done on a user’s behalf, it has an incentive to filter out anything that feels like “acceptable spam,” even if those interruptions historically funded the web.

The deeper shift is that persuasion may move earlier in the chain.

In an ad-led web, brands optimize for attention at the point of exposure. In an agent-mediated web, brands may need to earn inclusion in the agent’s shortlist before the user ever “sees” a message.

Strategic observation: The scarcest resource is no longer attention; it’s selection by systems that ration attention for people.

From SEO to AEO: being findable to agents becomes the job

Animoca Brands’ framing of AEO (agent engine optimisation) is a direct signal to marketers: discoverability is being redefined.

SEO assumed a human clicks a result and then decides. AEO assumes an agent retrieves, evaluates, and acts, sometimes without a click. That changes what “good marketing” looks like because brands are no longer speaking only to audiences. They are also speaking to intermediaries that interpret information.

Animoca Brands suggests a set of “agent friendly” moves: plugging into LLMs, setting up model context protocol (MCP) servers, and tokenising assets. Regardless of which technical approach wins, the marketing principle is consistent:

• If agents cannot reliably access your product, policies, and claims, your brand becomes operationally invisible.
• If agents can access it but cannot trust it, your brand becomes strategically expensive, because agents will route around uncertainty.

Strategic observation: In an agent-first market, your “brand site” is not your homepage; it’s your machine-readable posture.

What this means for marketers

If this trajectory holds, marketing teams will need to treat agents as both a new audience and a new channel controller.

1. Start by “using an agent” as a capability audit
   Animoca Brands’ advice is practical: you do not become agent-ready by reading about agents. You become agent-ready by delegating real tasks to one and watching where it fails. Those failure points are your future content, product, and data roadmap.
2. Assume content volume rises, but differentiation gets harder
   The expectation of an “explosion of productivity and content” creates a paradox: more output, less distinctiveness. Teams will need tighter positioning and clearer proof, because abundance makes vague claims easier for agents to ignore.
3. Plan for agent-mediated distribution, not just agent-made creative
   Many marketers are focused on agents generating copy, images, or code. The longer-term competitive edge may come from being the brand that agents choose to recommend, retrieve, or transact with when the user asks.
4. Treat “findability” as a cross-functional KPI
   AEO is not just marketing. It pulls in product documentation, customer support accuracy, structured data, policy clarity, and technical accessibility. If those functions do not align, the agent experience fragments, and the brand loses the delegation moment.
5. Re-evaluate the role of interruption in your growth model
   If agents reduce interruption by default, then performance tactics that depend on breaking into a feed face structural headwinds. The brands that adapt will build value that users, and their agents, actively request.

The more interesting question is not whether advertising disappears. It’s which parts of advertising survive when “interruption” is no longer the default interface pattern.

What changes next is measurement and influence. When an agent becomes the decision assistant, marketers have to win twice: once in the user’s mind, and once in the agent’s retrieval and evaluation logic.

That is why platforms like Minds are strategically relevant even before they reach mass adoption. They are rehearsals for a world where marketing is less about buying attention and more about becoming the obvious choice inside delegated workflows.