Gamee, a Prague based social gaming network with over 4 million monthly active users, has completed a 2 million EUR funding round. This funding was was co-led by Initial Capital and Credo Ventures with additional funding coming from Index Ventures, and a few individual angels, validates Gamee’s already proven strategy in its social gaming platform, as well as its key brand and platform partnerships.
Gamee is on a mission to make games easily embeddable, playable with friends, and shareable across platforms. It was one of 10 launch partners for Facebook Instant Games and global launch partner for gaming in Telegram and Kik. The company has worked with brands like Coca-Cola, Bershka, Skoda and NASA amongst others to develop games that facilitate brand connectivity with global audiences in a fun and highly engaging way.
Since launching in late 2015, as well as building its platform, the company has developed 60 games that are distributed via bots in Facebook Messenger, Kik, Telegram, along with its own app. Platform analysis reveals high retention and loyalty with average active users spending around 30 minutes of game time per day, which is on par with user engagement rates of Snapchat. So far Gamee has had 500 million game plays.
Gamee does not charge players for games or in app purchases, instead monetisation will come from sponsored games and ads. The company will dedicate much of this investment to product development and key hires.
“Gamee has a unique chance to be among the social media giants through its amazing power with bots, where we see a huge amount of engagement,” said Bozena Rezab, CEO and Founder of Gamee. “Many users will then go on to find more games via the app.”
“Social gaming is an exciting space which is constantly evolving. Gamee is at the forefront of this by providing frictionless sharing of games across all social environments and connecting friends via the games they love,” said Shukri Shammas, Partner at Initial Capital. Initial Capital are the team behind Playfish who sold to EA Games for $400m. Shukri will join the company’s board of directors.
“We are excited to back Bozena and her team”, said Andrej Kiska of Credo Ventures, “Gamee is a shining example of the thriving Central European gaming ecosystem, which is able to consistently deliver global success stories from the field.”
“The cross-platform nature of HTML5 allows frictionless sharing of games as easy as sharing YouTube videos on the internet without the need to download the games or go to the app store to find them”, says Bozena Rezab. ”This is a big game changer for brands looking for new ways to engage with their audiences in a more meaningful way.”
