Romanian game design startup Machinations.io raised $3.3 million in Series A funding round led by European VC firm Hiro Capital and follow-on investments by Acequia Capital, Venrex Investment Management and GapMinder.
Machinations.io develops a global browser-based platform to design and predict game economies and systems for premium games, free2play and play2earn. The company plans to use the latest investments to grow its team and launch new features and services to support the rapid development of users.
“We are honored to be backed by such reputable venture capital firms and to have their confidence in our vision and role within the video game industry and beyond. We are growing our team and rolling out integrations with the most popular gaming telemetry providers and Web3 marketplaces, furthering our goal of becoming the standard for modeling, forecasting and optimizing the gaming economy,” said Mihai Gheza, co-founder and CEO. on Machinations.io.
The startup has attracted around $5 million in funding so far. Prior to this Series A round, Machinations.io raised $1.6 million in funding from Seedcamp, GapMinder, Acequia Capital, and several high-profile angel investors.
The platform is currently used by over 35,000 professionals, having built one of the largest game design communities on the market.
“We first invested in Machinations.io in 2020, during a seed round we led. We continue to support founders because of the uniqueness of the product they created. This product completely changes the way games are created and designed and implicitly the way the largest entertainment industry grows,” said Cosmin Ochișor, partner at GapMinder, a €50 million venture capital fund that invests in technology companies created in Romania and Central Europe.
Founded in 2018 by Mihai Gheza, Dana Gheza, Radu Crăciun, Alin Moldovan and Joris Dormans, professor at the Leiden University Center for Arts in Society (Netherlands), the startup was born from a Ph.D. research at the University of Amsterdam in 2012 by one of its co-founders, and it has since spread organically to over 400 academic institutions worldwide.
Machinations.io is one of the region’s emerging gaming startups, alongside many new and exciting startups in the industry from countries such as SerbiaBulgaria and Croatia.