Animoca Brands co-founder Yat Siu will become the company's Chief Executive Officer on December 1, 2026, according to an announcement he made on LinkedIn. Siu will continue serving as Executive Chairman. In the same transition, current Group President Evan Auyang will move into a Senior Advisor role to the Board.
Siu framed the appointment around a new direction for Animoca Brands: centrally building on its digital ownership and tokenization ambitions with a growing focus on artificial intelligence agents. He wrote that he takes on the CEO post with “total conviction in the importance of melding agentic AI with genuine ownership.”
Leadership history
Animoca Brands previously had Robby Yung as CEO, a position he held from 2014. In October 2021, the company 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.
The latest 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, and it has also been focusing on how AI agents could become major participants in the digital economy.
Agentic AI focus
In his LinkedIn post, 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.
He also raised questions about ownership and control as agents take on larger roles: who owns these agents, and who captures the value they generate? Siu wrote in a company letter that “the convergence of AI and Web3 is inevitable,” and that the convergence could 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, according to Siu.
Three key businesses
Siu highlighted three businesses for Animoca Brands' next growth phase:
- Minds by Animoca Brands: The company's push into agentic AI, announced in February this year. It allows users to deploy always-on AI agents across applications. The platform has processed 936 billion tokens and supported more than 320 external integrations.
- Moca Network: 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.
- NUVA Finance: 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 Brands' broader ecosystem of more than 600 portfolio companies and digital assets. The company reported unaudited FY2025 bookings of $173 million. As Siu takes on the CEO role, these three areas appear to be key focus points for Animoca Brands' new chief executive.
