African mobile publisher Carry1st received $6 million in investments, including from Riot Games. With this money, the company hopes to attract developers from all over the world to the local market.
Carry1st management: Cordel Robbin-Coker, Lucy Hoffman and Tinotenda Mundangepfupfu. Source: Carry1st
According to the VentureBeat portal, the Series A round was headed by the Konvoy Ventures venture fund.
Riot Games, Akatsuki Entertainment Technology Fund, Raine Ventures and TTV Capital also invested money in the publisher.
According to Carry1st CEO Cordel Robbin-Coker, the investment will help the company expand its staff, scale its gaming portfolio and sign contracts with international studios.
It is likely that Carry1st will spend part of the collected funds on the development of Pay1st. This is a fintech platform that allows African users to pay with local bank cards in mobile applications. Note that Google Play and the App Store do not support most of these cards, and this seriously hinders the monetization of foreign games.
Pay1st was launched last year after a seed round of financing, in which the startup raised about $4 million. At the moment, Carry1st has raised a total of $9.5 million.
Carry1st itself was founded in 2018. The company started as a development studio, but then retrained into a publisher. Now she is engaged in localization, promotion and publication of games in African countries. Moreover, Carry1st pays special attention to partnerships with global studios: it provides them with access to a new market, and African developers with contracts to create games under licenses.
In total, the publishing house employs 26 people, some of whom came from Carlyle, King, Jumia, Rovio, Socialpoint, Ubisoft and Wargaming.