Dapper Labs dated its Brud acquisition to October 2021

The persona

Lil Miquela, the longest-running of Brud's characters, changed corporate hands in 2021. Dapper Labs' own newsroom release, dated Vancouver, B.C., 4 October 2021, states that "Dapper Labs Inc., the company behind NBA Top Shot and the Flow blockchain, today announced its acquisition of Sequoia Capital-backed startup Brud." The release names Trevor McFedries as Brud's founder and CEO, and Kara Weber and Nicole de Ayora as its chief operating and chief product officers, all joining Dapper Labs to lead a new unit called Dapper Collectives.

What the documents establish

The release states Brud's investors as "Sequoia Capital, Spark Capital and SV Angel amongst others" and describes Lil Miquela as "a virtual celebrity with nearly 10 million fans," a figure this site attributes to Dapper Labs' own announcement rather than to any independently audited count. The same document is internally inconsistent about Brud's founding, stating in one place that McFedries "launched" Brud "in 2016" and, later in the same release, that the company's "inception" was "in Los Angeles 2017"; neither year is resolved by this document alone. The release does not disclose a purchase price or deal structure for the acquisition.

Character versus company

The acquisition is a transaction between two corporations, Dapper Labs and Brud, represented by named executives quoted in the release, including Dapper Labs CEO Roham Gharegozlou. Lil Miquela's own feed does not announce or explain the sale; her Instagram account, checked on the date of this review, shows a bio written in first-person character voice and a platform-reported 2.2 million followers, a smaller figure than the "nearly 10 million" Dapper Labs cited in 2021, though this site cannot verify what caused any difference between the two counts.

What to watch

Brud's own site, archived in January 2023, describes a pivot toward "collectively created" and "collectively owned" characters and a wish to "bust this wide open" on community ownership, language that fits the Dapper Labs blockchain relationship without ever naming Dapper Labs directly on the page. Whether Dapper Collectives is still an active unit, and whether the ownership pivot described on Brud's own site ever launched as a product, are open questions this review did not resolve.

• Did Dapper Collectives ship any product built on the ownership model Brud's own site describes?
• What accounts for the gap between Dapper Labs' 2021 'nearly 10 million' figure and Instagram's current 2.2 million count?
• Which year, 2016 or 2017, does Brud's own later material treat as its actual founding date?

The clearest fact here is corporate: a named blockchain company acquired a named media studio and its executive team in October 2021, and every claim about the character built on top of that studio, including her fan count, traces back to one of the two companies rather than to Miquela herself.