Animoca Brands co-founder Yat Siu is set to take over as the company’s Chief Executive Officer in a major leadership change.
Yat announced the decision in a Linkedin post and also highlighted the new direction for the company. He revealed that now Animoca looks to centrally build on its digital ownership and tokenization ambitions with a growing focus on artificial intelligence (AI) agents.
The appointment, announced an hour back, will take effect on December 1, 2026. As part of the transition, current Group President Evan Auyang will move into a Senior Advisor role to the Board, while Siu will continue serving as Executive Chairman.
The leadership transition does not appear to be an abrupt change in direction. Animoca Brands has been increasingly positioning tokenization as a mainstream financial and technological development. It has also been focusing on how AI agents could become the next major participants in the digital economy with Yat making continuous appearances on the topics.
In a post, he wrote, “I take on the CEO post with total conviction in the importance of melding agentivc AI with genuine ownership”.
Animoca Brands shifts focus towards agentic AI
Siu is among the prominent figures in the digital asset industry and has been a leading advocate of digital property rights. He co-founded Animoca Brands and has led its expansion into blockchain-based ownership, gaming and investments.
The company previously had Robby Yung as its CEO, a position he held from 2014. In October 2021, Animoca Brands announced a leadership restructuring that saw Siu take on the role of Group Executive Chairman and Managing Director, Auyang become Group President, and Yung move to lead its North American operations.
Announcing his new role on LinkedIn, Siu said Animoca Brands was entering another major technological transformation, this time driven by agentic AI.
He believes AI agents will increasingly become the primary interface to the internet, handling activities such as creating, investing and conducting transactions on behalf of users.
However, their growing role also raises questions about ownership and control. Who owns these agents, and who captures the value they generate?
“The convergence of AI and Web3 is inevitable,” Siu wrote in a company letter believing the convergence to address some of these questions. While AI makes technology more accessible, blockchain can provide the identity, ownership, trust and financial infrastructure needed for autonomous agents to operate.
Animoca Brands’ Current Businesses in Focus
As Yat highlighted, Animoca Brands is focusing its next growth phase around three key businesses: Minds by Animoca Brands, Moca Network and NUVA Finance.
Minds represents its push into agentic AI, Announced this year in Feb, it allows users to deploy always-on AI agents across applications. The platform has already processed 936 billion tokens and supported more than 320 external integrations/
Meanwhile, Moca Network is developing decentralized identity and reputation infrastructure through its AIR platform. It has more than 2.6 million MocaID users and a MOCA token reserve valued at approximately $131 million.
On the institutional finance side, NUVA Finance is focused on bringing real-world assets on-chain through stablecoin-based vaults, including products backed by tokenized financial instruments and home equity assets. NUVA’s development company raised $5.2 million in a seed funding round led by Morgan Creek Digital in May 2026.
These businesses form part of Animoca’s broader ecosystem of more than 600 portfolio companies and digital assets, with the company reporting unaudited FY2025 bookings of $173 million. Now as Yat takes on as CEO, these three seems like the key focus areas in the itenary of new Animoca Brands CEO.
Sneha Agrawal 
Share