Mojiworks raised nearly $2.77 million (£2.1 million) in a Series A round of funding for its messenger-based games. The round is led by Balderton Capital, which previously invested in companies such as Wooga, NaturalMotion and Big Fish. Other participants include Lifeline Ventures, an early investor in Supercell (Clash Royale), and Sunstone Capital, who invested in Seriously (Best Fiends Forever).
Founded in 2016, Mojiworks has developed a few games for messaging platforms already, such as MojiQuest and Moji Bowling for iMessage on iOS devices. CEO Matthew Wiggins says that they’re drawn not only to the huge user base — Facebook Messenger recently surpassed 1.3 billion monthly active users — but also the opportunity to create deeply social games for those who are already in constant communication with one another.
“This combination, of a massive potential market opening up plus the new interactions it enables, are absolutely perfect for creating a startup — hence why we created Mojiworks in 2016 to go after it early, with the mission of making the platform defining games for messaging,” said Wiggins in an email to GamesBeat.
According to Mojiworks, MojiQuest and Moji Bowling have together been downloaded over 1.5 million times. It launched both apps as experiments to see what players wanted from messaging-based games and to gather data about stats like reach, retention, and revenue.
Wiggins says there are some technical challenges when it comes to designing games for messaging. For instance, they have to use HTML5 instead of something like Unity because of resource constraints. Fortunately, it’s something that Wiggins and Mojiworks CTO Alan Harding have experience with; they both previously developed chat games at Zynga in 2011 using HTML5.
“As for design, there is much for developers to learn about how to create experiences in a context that can potentially support many different types of social play that mainstream players haven’t seen before. Simply porting other games, even from mobile, is not going to get the best out messaging’s ability to meaningfully connect people,” said Wiggins. “In many respects, it feels like a return to the early App Store or Facebook App Platform period when there were many new things to be discovered but only minority of teams had the ability to do that. We aim to be one of those for messaging.”
The Series A funds will go toward new hires and expanding Mojiworks’ portfolio of games. It’s developing QuestFriends for Facebook Instant Games, which it plans to launch in Q4.
“Our mission, of making the platform defining games for messaging, means we’re totally focused on making messaging-first games — those that are built from the ground up to get the best from the platform,” said Wiggins. “We’ll do this by having a culture of iteration and collaboration, creating multiple distinct but related concepts and games. We believe this is best done with a collection of lean, cross-discipline, teams. The funding will help us hire to grow several more of these teams over the next year, based in our new office in Guildford UK, and then run multiple games in parallel. This will lead to us having a portfolio of successful games and IP.”