Arcanix, the LiveOps strategy platform, has secured investment and accelerator support from ForsVC and imec.istart, one of Europe’s leading tech accelerators, to drive the next phase of its growth.
Arcanix is building a new class of software-as-a-service (SaaS) tool to make the ongoing management of a game more efficient, engaging and effective.
The platform uses data-driven insights and forecasting to provide game teams with visibility across the entire organization in terms of both operational efficiency, player engagement and revenue. Arcanix makes your LiveOps smarter, more commercially sustainable, and even more delightful for your players.
The partnership includes joining imec.istart’s accelerator in Belgium, where Arcanix will establish a new entity – while maintaining its operational roots in the UK.
Eric Diepeveen, Venture Partner at ForsVC, said in a statement, “Arcanix is solving one of gaming’s most pressing challenges – scaling LiveOps while staying true to players. The team’s deep industry expertise and bold vision make them an exciting partner for us.”
Robby Wauters, Venture Acceleration Manager at imec.istart, added in a statement, “LiveOps games is a fast-moving sector – and Arcanix is poised to deliver strategic value to game teams. We’re excited to support their journey and welcome them to our accelerator program.”
Ella Romanos, CEO of Arcanix.ai, commented, “This is a major milestone for us. With ForsVC and imec.istart behind us, we’re ready to deliver a platform that empowers game teams to run better LiveOps – smarter, fairer, and built for long-term success. We’re proud to grow across both Belgium and Scotland.”
This strategic backing will accelerate product development, onboarding of early partners, and the expansion of the Arcanix team across Europe. The Arcanix team will be at DevCom and Gamescom in Cologne from 18-22nd August talking to game developers about their LiveOps Strategy platform as well as helping to organise a LiveOps Networking Happy-hour alongside the Community Clubhouse https://lu.ma/dbmx7h6s.
Arcanix has been supported by membership of the Scottish Enterprise high-growth ventures portfolio (https://www.scottish-enterprise.com/)
Arcanix was founded by industry veterans, Ella Romanos, Oscar Clark and Adam Betteridge, who between them have decades of experience of live game development and of the creative industries.
The company has a team of six and it is hiring. The company was originally founded in 2023 and received funding from Scottish Enterprise to develop our prototype in 2024. This is the first equity investment and means it will be establishing a new office in Ghent in Belgium.
Members of the team have spent decades working with online game teams and literally wrote the book on ‘Games as a service’ back in 2014, which helped establish a level of ‘thought leadership’ in the space. (As an FYI, Clark has a new book on Game Economy Design due out early next year)
Clark said in a message to GamesBeat that the reality is that too many LiveOps games fail with teams burning out or failing to deliver profitable experiences.
“We keep seeing the same issues time and time again. Key to this being the lack of visibility and coordination between the interdependent teams across the whole organization,” Clark said.
He said it’s not just the development team. Marketing, community, DevOps, and even legal have critical parts to play in getting a seasonal update out. And the company has to create updates for players on a daily, weekly, monthly and even quarterly basis. Predictability and consistency matter, he said.
“Get it wrong and its like someone stopping at the bottom of a busy escalator,” Clark said. “People very soon end up piling into each other and getting hurt. Add to that we don’t know whether the things we build are going to deliver the engagement needed and player engagement is absolutely necessary to achieve the retention needed and only then will see the revenues.”
As far as what the company hopes to fix, Clark said, “The current general purpose tools don’t support the strategic decision making needed to fix these issues – let alone cut waste and increase revenue. So our system joins the dots to give you visibility of your game’s entire lifecycle; improve efficiency of your internal operations and help you to make better decisions.”
He added, “We use Machine Learning and AI ethically across all the games to provide deep level insights that humans could not find. We focus on the net rate of changes across both consumer and production metrics to understand the true health of your game. In short we make it easier and cheaper to run live games and make more revenue.”