Roboto Games Closes $15m in Funding
Looking for New Team Members to Help Make Games that are Good Alone and Great Together
Hi! We’re Roboto Games, a VC-backed development studio of game industry vets dedicated to creating video games that are good alone and great together. Our mission is to bring friends together via games that are accessible anytime and anywhere. We’re bringing this philosophy to our currently in development game, codenamed Foragers and Fighters, a bite-sized survival/crafting MMO with character collection and optional digital asset ownership as well as support for a thriving user generated content (UGC) ecosystem.
Roboto Games is a remote work friendly studio headquartered in San Mateo, California and we are currently looking for a diverse array of talented people to join us (looking at you, Tech Artists and Product Marketing folks!). Why should you join us? This is not our first rodeo, Roboto Games is our second VC-backed independent game studio.
Back in 2007, we created venture backed ZipZapPlay where we made top 20 social Facebook games and a UGC platform with over 200K games on it. We found success with Baking Life (our 1.5M daily players baked lots of cupcakes) and we sold the company to PopCap (zombies also eat cupcakes it turns out) a few months before they sold to EA.
Beginning with ZipZapPlay, and continuing today at Roboto Games, we devote a significant amount of time and energy creating a culture where everyone has a voice. When you look at the folks who make up Roboto Games, many of us have worked together on and off for over a decade because of that culture.
We create an environment where everyone feels safe to express their thoughts, ideas, and concerns. We welcome hard conversations because they give us the opportunity to make the best decisions. Our best work is done when we test our games early and often with our players.
If this sounds interesting and you want to make games that are good alone and great together, we have great news. We are looking for talented individuals to join us. We have big ambitions to build extraordinary experiences that resonate with players everywhere and empower them to do the same on our distributed UGC platform.
We raised capital to ensure a healthy runway for continued growth and creative development. We are thrilled to have recently closed our $15M series A, led by the smart folks at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z).
“I worked with Curt and Mathilde back at PopCap, and am thrilled to be partnering with them again,” said James Gwertzman, General Partner at a16z. “The Roboto Games team is obsessed with creating deep, immersive gameplay, and bringing that player-first mindset to web3 games.”
Games need to be fun first. Many web3 games forgot this and failed to create solid game and economy designs which left players holding worthless NFTs or tokens. Our solution is to focus on making a great free to play game that our players love first before adding the option of digital assets. Those players can then choose to collect web3 assets if they want to, or play our games entirely without them and have a great time.
The round also included investment from the amazing people at Ancient8, Animoca Brands, Gumi Cryptos Capital, Harrison Metal Capital, Makers Fund, Merit Circle, and Transcend with angel investment from Daniel James, Jameson Hsu, Pany Haritatos, Phil Chen, Cristian Manea in addition to many great angels from the PKO Angel Syndicate, bringing our total investment to $19.5M to date. Our 2019 seed round was led by Harrison Metal Capital with significant participation from Makers Fund.
The entire team at Roboto Games would like to express our gratitude to all our backers who believe in our team’s talent and proven ability to bring inclusive cross-platform games that deliver fun multiplayer action to players everywhere. The funding will help us continue hiring a diverse team, building an inclusive culture and shipping games that are good alone and great together.
Interested in joining us? Check out our open positions at https://robotogames.com/careers and follow us on Twitter at https://twitter.com/robotogames.
We are excited to meet you!
OUR FOUNDERS
Curt Bererton, CEO
Curt holds a Ph.D. in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University. He has 18 years of experience in games and grew up on a farm in Canada.
Mathilde Pignol, CCO
Mathilde holds a Masters in Human Computer Interaction from Carnegie Mellon University. She has 15 years of experience in games and grew up in the banlieues of Paris.