London Venture Partners -- VCs who funded Supercell, NaturalMotion, Playfish, Applifier, and Unity -- team up with big names in the game industry to fund European developers.
European mobile game startup looking for funding? Today might be your lucky day. Venture capital firm London Venture Partners has announced a new fund, backed by big names, that seeks to fund game startups in their earliest stages. The fund is aimed at studios that need initial seed funding; LVP is looking to make initial investments of between $50,000 and $500,000. LVP has not disclosed how much, in total, the fund comprises. As for where the money's coming from, the fund is backed by Wargaming, Nexon, and Zynga CEO Don Mattrick; for its part, London Venture Partners is managed by a group of industry veterans including Microsoft Europe exec Phil Harrison. LVP previously funded successful studios such as Clash of Clans creator Supercell, which sold a 51 percent stake for $1.5 billion, and NaturalMotion, which Zynga acquired for $527 million. In a TechCrunch interview, LVP general partner Paul Heydon says that the fund will mostly target mobile startups in the Nordic region -- particularly Finland, thanks to generous government investment in startups there -- and that LVP is interested in mid-core developers in particular. Most important? "You have to be making games that have the potential to be appealing to millions and millions of users in order to have the potential to build something big.” As to why the fund focuses on Europe, Heydon points out that "There’s a huge amount of creative talent that’s coming out of Europe -- there always has been -- but historically they haven’t had the ability to raise anywhere as much capital as in the U.S. because there just hasn’t been the capital." Interested studios can contact London Venture Partners via its website.
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