by - Homa has raised $100 million in a Series B round to expand its platform for indie game developers.
- The French startup counts Spotify founder Daniel Ek among its investors.
- Check out the 19-slide pitch deck to raise the Series B round below.
French gaming startup Homa, which aims to make game development easier and more efficient, has raised $100 million in a Series B round.
The Paris-based company, founded in 2018 by Daniel Nathan and Olivier Le Bas, has built a data-driven platform that gives indie game developers a complete set of tools to improve their games in a hyper-competitive gaming world for cell phones.
“The thing about gaming is that it’s a very unfair business,” said CEO Nathan. “If you’re not very creative and data-driven, you’re probably going to fail. If you look at the number of games that have more than 1,000 installs, it’s extremely low compared to the number of games that were released.”
Homa aims to inform developers about live trends in mobile games to help them make decisions about things like what kind of game they should play, how they should test it, and what KPIs they should measure.
The company also has an in-house development team that publishes games in a range of genres, including hypercasual, arcade and digital board games, which Nathan said help “show what you can do” with the technology.
It points to how game engines like Unreal showcase the capabilities of their technology with games like Fortnite.
“Every time you have a new release of a game engine, they make a crazy trailer to show off their technology, they want to attract developers and say ‘look what you can do with this,'” Nathan said.
“It’s kind of the same strategy we have with our in-house developers, we want to show what you can do with Homa,” he said.
Homa, previously backed by Spotify CEO Daniel Ek, raised the funds in a Series B round led by venture capital firms Quadrille Capital and Headline, with participation from others including Northzone, Fabric Ventures, Bpifrance, Eurazeo and Singular.
It brings Homa’s total raised to $165 million after last year’s $65 million Series A round, helping it grow and secure key partnerships with gaming companies such as NFT-based Sorare.
Nathan acknowledged that the round had been raised during an increasingly tough funding environment for European startups as investors grappled with an economic downturn, but said he believed “extremely good companies will continue to earn profits” and there will be ” flight to quality”.
According to the startup, games that have used its platform have been installed over 1 billion times. It generates cash through a revenue-sharing system with developers taking profits from games that run, Nathan said.
“A lot of things won’t work, but the things that will work will make a lot of money,” he said.
Homa will use the new funds to further scale its business by investing more in its technology and data products, while seeking to attract more talent globally to expand its current team size of approximately 160 people and pursue what said they would be “strategic acquisitions. “
See the 19-slide pitch deck used to raise the funds below:
