INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Teatime Games, a new Icelandic &social games& startup from the same team behind the hugely popular QuizUp (acquired in by Glu Mobile), is
disclosing $9 million in funding, made up of seed and Series A rounds.
Index Ventures led both, but have been joined by Atomico, the
European VC fund founded by Skype Niklas Zennström, for the $7.5 million Series A round
I understand this is the first time the two VC firms have done a Series A deal together in over a decade.
Both VCs have a decent track
Index counts King, Roblox and Supercell as previous gaming investments, whilst Atomico also backed Supercell, along with Rovio, and most
recently Bossa Studios.
As part of the round, Guzman Diaz of Index Ventures, Mattias Ljungman of Atomico, and David Helgason, founder of
Unity, have joined the Teatime Games board of directors.
Meanwhile, Teatime Games is keeping shtum publicly on exactly what the stealthy
startup is working on, except that it plays broadly in the social and mobile gaming space
In a call with co-founder and CEO Thor Fridriksson yesterday, he said a little more off the record and on condition that I don&t write about
it yet.
What he was willing to describe publicly, however, is the general problem the company has set out to solve, which is how to make
mobile games more social and personalised
Specifically, in a way that any social features — including communicating with friends and other players in real-time — enhances the
gameplay rather than gets in its way or is simply bolted on as an adjunct to the game itself.
The company macro thesis is that games have
always been inherently social throughout different eras (e.g
card games, board games, arcades, and consoles), and that most games truly come to life &through the interaction between people, opponents,
However, in many respects this has been lost in the age of mobile gaming, which can feel like quite a solitary experience
That either because they are single player games or turn-based and played against invisible opponents.
Teatime plans to use the
newly-disclosed investment to double the size of its team in Iceland, with a particular focus on software engineers, and to further develop
its social gaming offering for third party developers
Yes, that right, this is clearly a developer platform play, as much as anything else.
On that note, Atomico Partner Mattias Ljungman says
the next &breakout opportunity& in games will see a move beyond individual studios and titles to what he describes as fundamental enabling
Linked to this he argues that the next generation of games companies being developed will &become ever more mass market and socially
You can read much more on Ljungman and Atomico gaming thesis in a blog post recently published by the VC firm.
