Roboto Games Secures $15 Million in Series A Funding Led by A16z

On Tuesday, November 29, Roboto Games announced raising $15 million in a Series A funding round led by VC giant Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). With a $600 million commitment, Roboto launched its first focused game earlier this year in May.

Roboto Games Funding

Roboto Games is a new gaming studio in the market and seeks to bridge the Web2 experience with the existing Web3 elements. The recent funding round is a testament that good projects continue to garner interest even in the current bear market.

Roboto said that they will use these funds to build out the company’s second game. Additionally, they also consider hiring for a variety of roles including marketers and artists. In addition to a16z, some of the other participating VC investors include Animoca Brands, Ancient8, Harrison Metal Capital, Gumi Cryptos Capital, Merit Circle, Makers Fund, Transcend, and other angel investors. Including the seed round of 2019, Robot Games have raised a total of $19.5 million.

Based out of San Mateo, California, Roboto Games specializes in making free-to-play games that are available across PCs, mobile, and the Web. These games can be played with or without Web3 elements such as non-fungible tokens (NFTs) or other in-game tokens. Additionally, Robot Games is also planning for a user-generated content (UGC) platform.

Current Market Presence of Roboto Games

The fastly rising gaming studio Roboto Games has currently released its fast-moving battle game Last Mage Standing. Roboto Games founder Curt Bererton said that this game has already garnered a few million players.

Now, the team at Roboto Games remains primarily focused on developing a survival/crafting massively multiplayer online (MMO) game currently codenamed Foragers and Fighters. The gaming studio plans to launch an initially playable version of the game during the first quarter of 2023. Although the game will feature character collection and asset crafting aspects, it will initially lack Web3 elements. Speaking on the development, Bererton said:

“We want to make sure that we have the game core solidified and it’s working well and it’s really fun first before we launch any sort of NFTs or tokens associated with the project. Because, for example, if we change a big aspect of the game, we don’t want those NFTs to be invalidated by some design change that we make.”

Before the birth of Bitcoin in 2007, Roboto Games created ZipZapPlay. They later sold this company to PopCafe. Now, Roboto Games is looking to leverage the power of blockchain technology and build the future of gaming. “Something that I think is not covered a lot in Web3 media is the permanence of the data behind the blockchain, and what that can allow you to do,” said Bererton.