ADGM Regulator Grants Animoca Brands Fund-Management Permission

Animoca Brands has received approval to run investment funds in Abu Dhabi. The Financial Services Regulatory Authority, which regulates Abu Dhabi Global Market, granted a Financial Services Permission to Animoca Asset Management (AD) Limited, a subsidiary of the digital assets firm.

The permission allows AAM to manage funds in or from ADGM, the financial centre of the UAE capital.

Animoca Brands said the licence widens what it can offer institutional clients and supports its expansion across the Middle East. It also underpins the company's plans to build blockchain infrastructure for institutions and to connect traditional financial firms with decentralised networks. Animoca builds and invests in technologies that include autonomous agentic AI, and it is developing tokenised assets while pairing agentic AI with Web3.

Minh Do, senior executive officer and director at AAM, said the subsidiary can now run pooled investment funds inside a supervised framework, and described its aim as bringing institutional capital together with digital assets and the emerging agentic web.

Arvind Ramamurthy, chief market development officer at ADGM, said Animoca Brands' entry into fund management tightens the link between institutional capital and digital assets inside the centre's ecosystem.

The licence moves a crypto-native company into a conventional fund regime, one overseen by a financial centre that has spent years building a licensing route for digital asset businesses. Fund management sits closer to the allocators who write the cheques than trading or advisory work does. It gives Animoca a structure through which pension funds, family offices and other backers could commit money to tokenised strategies.