A mobile studio with Russian roots Donut Lab participated in a new round of financing. She received $ 2.3 million from investors, which she will spend on the further development of the cartoon shooter Kids vs Zombies.
The Series A round was headed by the Level Up Foundation. Flyer One Ventures, Joint Journey, Dima Morozov (founder of Green Grey) and Sergey Kovalenko (co-founder of Braavo Capital) also invested money in the company.
Note that this is not the first investment for Donut Lab. Last September, it raised $1.6 million. In total, the studio has raised $4.4 million to date.
Previously, it was assumed that the full release of Kids vs Zombies would take place at the end of 2020, but in the end the authors decided to postpone it. Now the game is only available in beta format on Android. A beta version for iOS will be released early next year. The global release of the zombie title is also scheduled for 2022.
“Last year we thought we were very close to release,” said Tim Raiter, one of the founders of Donut Lab. “However, then we realized that the game was not ready yet. It had too complex a system of characters — heroes had to be combined with different weapons and different skills. We decided to simplify the game and completely updated this system. Now it’s a completely different game.”
Separately, the authors mentioned metrics. At the moment, the retention of the first day for Kids vs Zombies is 55%, and the conversion to payouts is 5%.
Kids vs Zombies takes place in a world where all adults have turned into zombies, and children are trying to kill as many living dead as possible. At the same time, children’s guns are fired not with bullets, but with soda or, for example, dislikes. The game has elements of both PvE and PvP.
Donut Lab Studio was founded in 2018 by Tim Reiter, Andrey Gordeev and Vitaly Urban. Before the studio was launched, they managed to work together on the BeUnicorn project. In addition, Gordeev participated in the development of the game Green Riding Hood, and Reiter and Urban jointly founded the Hello Baby service.