Based in South Africa Carry1st, an African publisher of social games and interactive content, has received a $27 million pre-Series B financing. Bitkraft Ventures led the investment, which included Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Konvoy, TTV Capital, Alumni Ventures, Lateral Capital, and Kepple Ventures.
The business, which has previously received investments from investors such as Google through its Africa Investment Fund and Avenir Growth Capital, will utilise the pre-Series B funding to develop, licence, and distribute additional games, as well as expand Pay1st.
“We now have, in our minds, the three best funds that focus on gaming and web3. And so it just adds even more resources, perspective and assistance to help us achieve our goals,” chief executive officer Cordel Robbin-Coker said.
Why The Investors Invested
The startup has gained a lot of traction. Carry 1st’s revenue has increased tenfold in the last year thanks to games like The President. Carry1st Shop, the gaming startup’s online store for virtual goods, lets users across Africa to pay for content and 100+ products using 120 various payment methods, including bank transfers, bitcoin, and mobile money, according to the company.
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According to the company, the funding round follows a successful year in which the first game from its CrazyHubs gaming accelerator — the accelerator Carry1st launched in partnership with CrazyLabs, one of its six partner studios — became the №1 downloaded game in the United States for a few days last July, according to data.ai. The President, produced by Nairobi-based Mekan Games, is partially inspired on a fictitious Donald Trump.
Jens Hilgers, the founding general partner at BITKRAFT Ventures, said, about the investment: “Africa is home to the largest population of young people in the world, and this upcoming generation will grow up digitally native with videogames as their primary entertainment preference. We have full conviction in Carry1st’s impressive founding team and their vision of building out foundational infrastructure and localized content, ensuring that gaming and interactive entertainment in Africa will thrive.”
A Look At What The Startup Does
Carry1st was a game firm that designed, produced, and launched mobile games in 2018. (starting with Carry1st Trivia). While the company still produces original games or lately began acquiring titles to improve, relaunch and distribute at scale (Mine Rescue and Gebeta), Carry1st also exclusively licences third-party games. Pay1st is an embedded financial platform that enables the startup to generate income from both owned and third-party games, with Riot Games as a client.
Carry1st announced a $20 million Series A extension round in January, following a $6 million Series A financing in May 2021 from numerous investors, including Riot Games, the developer and publisher of League of Legends, the most-played PC game in the world. Carry1st and Riot Games strengthened that commitment last year when they signed a collaboration in which the South African company pledged to pilot local payments for the American video game developer beginning in 2023. In other words, Carry1st will serve as Riot’s African payment partner.
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“The partnership [with Riot Games] is our big initiative this year because we built all this cool tech around payments and digital commerce, and we leveraged it only for our games,” remarked the CEO, who founded Carry1st with Lucy Hoffman and Tinotenda Mundangepfupfu. “But we figured that we may as well leverage the opportunity to partner with awesome big game companies that maybe aren’t yet ready to license their games to us fully but would like to make more money in the region and understand how profitable Africa can be for them.”
Meanwhile, the CEO of the four-year-old gaming business stated that the company has further collaborations, including a “big game licence deal that we’re enthusiastic about.” Carry1st is also building on the momentum of a successful partnership with Call of Duty: Mobile in South Africa that occurred in the fourth quarter of 2022, where Carry1st, acting as a local partner, instructed and directed the video games franchise on ways to achieve scale in South Africa during a three-month pilot test.
“It [South Africa] is a promising market for them, and they were eager to have a local partner to help them navigate and help to execute a pilot over three months last year. We hope that will lead to, you know, even deeper engagement and even sort of bigger and better prospects for that franchise, not just in South Africa but potentially across the continent,” he added.
According to Robbin-Coker, the alliance would make use of Pay1st, the gaming startup’s monetization-as-a-service platform for its own games as well as those of third-party publishers.
“What we found, particularly in countries like Nigeria, South Africa and Morocco, was that there was a massive appetite for digital content, especially with the ability to pay for it with local payment methods and, more importantly, in local currency, which is unique or unusual because most of the online purchases are denominated in dollars,” said the CEO. He stated that Carry1st was the gaming startup’s fastest-growing product last year as users and revenues surged fivefold.
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Robbin-Coker previously stated that Carry1st, based in South Africa, was looking into establishing infrastructure to allow play-to-earn gaming in Africa. Carry1st is building a test platform entitled Play1st, where players interested in web3 games may discover games, discuss them within communities, and display achievements and awards, according to the CEO — but with less zeal given how the market for web3 games has cooled in the last year.
Charles Rapulu Udoh
Charles Rapulu Udoh is a Lagos-based lawyer, who has several years of experience working in Africa’s burgeoning tech startup industry. He has closed multi-million dollar deals bordering on venture capital, private equity, intellectual property (trademark, patent or design, etc.), mergers and acquisitions, in countries such as in the Delaware, New York, UK, Singapore, British Virgin Islands, South Africa, Nigeria etc. He’s also a corporate governance and cross-border data privacy and tax expert.
As an award-winning writer and researcher, he is passionate about telling the African startup story, and is one of the continent’s pioneers in this regard