Investors continue to invest in chess. The Kings of Games startup, which was opened by grandmasters Dusko Pavasovich and Luka Lenic, raised funds for the development of the Chess Universe game. This is the second such investment in a year.
It is known that the funding round was headed by Transcend Fund, but the amount collected is not disclosed.
The chess boom began at the end of last year largely due to the success of the TV series “The Queen’s Move”. For example, after the release of the series, the views of chess-themed streams on Twitch increased significantly. If in October (on the eve of the release) the streams had about 3 million viewed hours, then in November this figure jumped to 8 million. By February, chess streams had already collected over 21 million viewed hours.
Against the background of the popularity of the “Queen’s Move”, the first chess investments took place this year. Garry Kasparov raised an unnamed sum from the Vivendi media company and opened a platform for playing chess.
Kasparov said in an interview with the VentureBeat portal that he had already launched a similar platform in 1999, but without success. He got the idea to restart the project a few years ago. It was planned that Kasparovchess would start working in 2020, but due to the pandemic, its start had to be postponed. But it did the platform good — it added techniques from the series, the authors of which Kasparov advised.
Chess Universe was first released in November 2019, and in March 2020 it had a global release. According to its authors, to date, the title has collected a million downloads. Investments Pavasovich and Lenich are going to spend on the release of updates to the game.