Swedish Blockchain Gaming Startup GOALS Secures $15M in Seed Funding

UTC by Godfrey Benjamin · 3 min read
Swedish Blockchain Gaming Startup GOALS Secures $15M in Seed Funding
Photo: GOALS / Instagram

With the new funding, GOALS will onboard additional staff to its engineering team including about 30 game developers.

GOALS, a Swedish blockchain game startup has raised the sum of $15 million in seed funding as it seeks to scale up its offering to non-crypto native players. According to a report by Tech.eu, the funding round was led by Northzone with existing investors Cherry Ventures, Moonfire Ventures, Banana Capital, and new investors Not Boring Capital and Cassius participating.

Drawing from its very impressive business model, GOALS also attracted a number of high-profile angel investors including Sorare’s Chief Executive Officer Nicolas Julia, FC Barcelona star Gerard Pique, and Axie Infinity’s Chief Operating Officer Aleksander Larsen. The seed funding is the most pronounced means by which the Stockholm-based startup will begin its prominent publicity as it seeks to secure its space in the growing Web3.0 world.

“We have been in the very fortunate position where investors reached out to us before we were actually fundraising so we were able to pick the ones we felt had the best fit for GOALS,” commented co-founder and CEO Andreas Thorstensson. “After playing most football games on the market and observing the esports scene for a long time I could see that gamers deserved something new. GOALS is a gameplay-first football game. Free to play, cross-play, multiplayer-focused, and esports-ready where the players can finally own their in-game items instead of renting them.”

GOALS is a blockchain game that works on the model of Play-to-Own. It affords players the opportunity to own their in-game assets including players, clubs, and skins. Riding on the capabilities of its underlying infrastructure, these in-game assets will be stored on the blockchain as Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs).

GOALS is free to play, however, the model is to take a commission on every NFT sale in the associated marketplace.

“With FIFA you only own the skins for a limited period of time,” explained Thorstensson, previously founder of e-sports organization SK Gaming and partner at EQT Ventures. “You can’t control them, you can’t sell them and you don’t have transparency – blockchain is the perfect solution to this.”

GOALS Blockchain Game Plans to Live the Dream

The dream is to bring every traditional gamer to come and gain a good appreciation of what GOALS is bringing to the table and with the new funding, the Swedish startup will be able to do just that. With the new funding, GOALS will onboard additional staff to its engineering team including about 30 game developers.

As noted by the firm, the utilization of the funds will also have to translate to choosing the very best blockchain protocol to power the impending traffic that the game is billed to generate with each player owning an average of 15 players. Besides Polygon, StarkWare, and Solana that have been considered in the past, recently exploited Ronin Network has also been considered to power the platform.

While not ruling out the adoption of the Ronin Bridge, Thorstensson said security will have to be enhanced to adopt the protocol that powers Axie Infinity.

“First of all, bridges are a security risk,” he admits, noting that the hack will likely facilitate increased focus on securing bridges. “From a security standpoint, we just need to make sure that the chain is very decentralized and that there are enough nodes and validators [to ensure majority control].”

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