We're tremendously excited to welcome a brand new company to our Portfolio today — Mojiworks — the UK startup focused purely on games for messaging platforms. Balderton Capital has led a £2.1M investment in the company.
With more than five billion people worldwide using messaging apps every month, we believe that messaging apps — such as iMessage and Facebook Messenger — are the next new platform for games. A new platform opportunity such as this represents that perfect opportunity to grow very fast at low cost, through organic and viral growth.
We have since gone eight years without investing in a single games company. Suranga Chandratillake tells us why Mojiworks broke that streak. Rob Moffat gives his perspective on the potential of this new platform for games.
Founded in 2016 by Matthew Wiggins and Alan Harding. Friends since age five, Al and Matthew previously worked together at Lionhead and went on to co-found UK startup Wonderland Software, developers of the no. 1 iOS title GodFinger, which sold to Zynga in 2011.
Since their founding last year, Mojiworks was the first to market with collaborative games for iMessage, and within its first year of operation, the team released two ‘proof of concept’ games MojiQuest and Moji Bowling, which between them have already attracted 1.5 million downloads.
With this round of investment, the company is focusing on developing games that bring together diverse groups of interconnected players, starting with QuestFriends, a multiplayer adventure game for Facebook Instant Games, which is aiming for launch later this year.
