CrypoKitties, the Ethereum blockchain-based kitten breeding and trading game that rose to prominence in late November, will become its own company with the assistance of $12 million in funding announced today, led by prominent venture capital firms Andreessen Horowitz and Union Square Ventures.

Launched Nov. 28, CryptoKitties allows players buy, sell and breed unique cartoon kittens with the object being to acquire cartoon kittens, each with a specific set of attributes, and then try to generate kittens with rare attributes by “breeding” them with other cats in their stable. Players looking to breed desirable kittens can acquire or sell kittens on a marketplace for the game that’s exclusively transacted on the Ethereum blockchain.

According to VentureBeat, CryptoKitties has more than 1.5 million users and has conducted more than $40 million in transactions. Some of the game’s most popular cats have sold for the equivalent of more than $200,000 each.

In an interview with SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE March 6, Jody Rebak (pictured, right), chief of staff at Axiom Zen, the company behind the game, said that “the purpose is to bring the first billion people to the blockchain, and CryptoKitties was the first endeavor to do that.”

CryptoKitties teaches users about smart contracts and the benefits of decentralization, and it builds their trust in the network, Rebak added. Its popularity — which at one point slowed the Ethereum decentralized smart contracts platform to a crawl — surprised the team behind it.

“I remember the team launched, and I woke up one morning with hundreds of emails from media outlets just saying, ‘We want to do a story on you,’” Rebak said.

Other investors who are embracing their inner cat-rearing selves include angel investor and Coinbase founder Fred Ehrsam, Naval Ravikant of AngelList, Mark Pincus of Zynga, Bill Tai of BitFury, William Mougayar of Token Summit, Avichal Garg of Y Combinator, Jeff Morris of Tinder, Balaji Srinavasian of Earn.com, Josh Stech of Lending Home, Joshua Naussbaum of Compound VC and Tyler Gaffney or Entrepid.

Photo: SiliconANGLE