Neon wants to bring direct-to-consumer commerce into more video games, and investors are buying into the vision.
Founded in 2022, Neon is a commerce infrastructure company that helps game publishers operate direct-to-consumer services like web stores. Today, July 22, the company announced a $13 million Series A funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz and Renegaden Partners, which also included Krafton as a strategic partner. Thus far, Neon has raised a total of $27 million across a November 2024 pre-seed round, a March 2026 seed funding round, and today’s Series A fundraise.
In an exclusive interview with GamesBeat, Neon founder and chief executive officer Chris Faught described his company’s Series A funding round as a “vote of confidence” in Neon’s prediction that direct-to-consumer commerce will become a core revenue stream for game makers within the next decade.
“Some studios that we work with are doing 50, 60, or 70 percent of their gross revenue through their direct channel today,” Faught said. “I think when we last raised, the high-water mark was around 25 or 30 percent.”
Krafton’s strategic investment in Neon comes on the heels of an ongoing partnership between Neon and Krafton, which the two companies signed in summer 2025 but did not publicly announce until today, per Faught. Through the partnership, Krafton will be “leveraging all of the payments and commerce infrastructure” built by Neon, per Faught, who declined to share more details about the partnership.
“The future of game publishing isn’t just about creating great games — it’s about building lasting relationships with the people who play them,” said Thomas Ko, the head of Krafton’s publishing platform division, in a press release. “Krafton plans to build better experiences for our fans by utilizing Neon’s technical flexibility and strategic autonomy.”
Faught said that the outcomes of last year’s legal challenges between Epic Games, Google, and Apple had encouraged both game makers and players to embrace in-game stores and web stores as a revenue stream, driving “a lot of growth” for the channel — good news for direct-to-consumer tech businesses like Neon, which celebrated the outcomes of both cases. However, he cautioned that the regulatory environment around in-game stores is still up in the air, citing the U.S. Supreme Court’s pending ruling on Apple’s appeal of last year’s decision.
“What isn’t changing, and what hasn’t changed from the beginning, is the viability of a fully external store channel — that isn’t going away,” Faught said. “Everybody can do that anywhere in the world; it’s more about this linking to the external purchase that may change.”
Neon is just getting started with its Series A fundraising round, and Faught said he is already looking toward the company’s next round as the regulatory environment around in-game commerce continues to open up. He declined to share the company’s current valuation under its Series A fundraise, but said that Neon will use the cash infusion to continue staffing up, invest further in developing loyalty systems, and expand its business into new regions and markets.
“There’s countless different payment processors still that we can onboard, integrate, optimize, and orchestrate — more countries that we need to enter to expand our coverage,” Faught said. “Those are the two main vectors that we’ll be investing in over the next few years.”