Innospark scores $6.5m in Series B funding
"This will lead Innospark to not only penetrate the Chinese market, but also succeed in the global market"
Innospark, the South Korean indie studio behind Dragon Friends: Green Witch, has secured $6.5 million in Series B funding with a little help from China-focused venture capital firm Keytone Ventures.
"This is an important next step for Innospark," said CEO Jae Chan Shin.
"This investment is a starting point for Innospark to build a long-term business partnership with Keytone Ventures as well as SL Investment and Company K Partners Limited. This will lead Innospark to not only penetrate the Chinese market, but also succeed in the global market. Also, it will be helpful to accelerate our development process for multi-screen platforms, such as Windows 10."
SL investment and Company K Partners Limited also participated in the round and the resulting funds will be used to grow its development team as it aims for the mid-core mobile market.
Earlier this month GamesIndustry.biz spoke to Shin about the decision to move away from casual.
"It's definitely becoming more challenging to acquire users in a maturing and growing mobile market. This is one of the reasons we are going with a mid-core title in Hero Sky, since, speaking frankly, games of this sort have shown the ability to garner high ARPU even with a customer base that isn't necessarily enormous. So, in a way, our new direction helps us partially mitigate the challenge of widespread discovery and adoption," he explained.
"Also, we should mention that sticking with casual games like our previous title, Dragon Friends: Green Witch, might not have been a bad choice if we planned to limit ourselves to mobile. However, we're also looking at a bigger picture, and actively investigating opportunities to bring our games to multiple formats, not just mobile. PC is one area we're looking into, for instance."