Carry1st - Afrikan Heroes

Sony Innovation Fund Kicks Off African Investment with Funding for South Africa’s Carry1st

January 30, 2024

In a groundbreaking move for Africa’s gaming industry, Carry1st, an Africa-focused game publisher and digital commerce platform, has secured a substantial investment from the Sony Innovation Fund. This marks the inaugural investment from the newly established Sony Innovation Fund: Africa, a venture capital initiative aimed at fostering the growth of entertainment businesses on the continent.

With over 200 million unique players, Africa’s gaming industry is on the brink of a remarkable transformation, driven by the rapid adoption of technology. According to industry sources like Newzoo and Carry1st, the sector is poised to surpass a market size of $1 billion in 2024.

Cordel Robbin-Coker, CEO and co-founder of Carry1st, expressed excitement about the collaboration, stating, “We are thrilled to join forces with Sony Innovation Fund: Africa. The relationship will help Carry1st drive the future of gaming in Africa.”

Carry1st’s unique position in the market, coupled with Sony’s extensive experience in the gaming and entertainment industry, is expected to create a formidable alliance. The partnership aims to explore and capitalize on the vast potential of the African gaming market.

Antonio Avitabile, Managing Director — EMEA, Sony Ventures Corporation, commented on the investment, stating, “We believe there is tremendous untapped potential for the gaming market in Africa, which we hope to experience and contribute to through our investment in Carry1st.”

This strategic collaboration is not only set to elevate Carry1st’s presence in the gaming industry but also contribute to the overall development and expansion of Africa’s entertainment landscape. As technology continues to reshape the continent’s economic and cultural landscape, the partnership between Carry1st and Sony sets a precedent for future investments and collaborations in Africa’s burgeoning gaming sector.

Sony Ventures’ Ambitious Plans for Africa

Sony Ventures plans to deploy its new $10 million fund, known as Sony Innovation Fund: Africa (SIF: AF), to support early-stage startups in the fields of gaming, music, film, and content distribution. This initiative is part of Sony Ventures Corporation’s broader efforts to back technology businesses across different markets and stages.

Despite fintech being the most funded sector in Africa, Sony Ventures is focusing on entertainment startups for its initial entry into the African market. Gen Tsuchikawa, CEO of Sony Ventures, stated that the company’s mission is to combine creativity and technology to enhance entertainment experiences worldwide.

Sony’s Africa-focused fund aims to provide much-needed support to entertainment tech startups in Africa, historically struggling to secure consistent venture capital. According to Partech Africa, these startups received only $42 million in 2022, accounting for just 0.9% of Africa’s total venture capital investments.

For example, the gaming market in Sub-Saharan Africa is expected to exceed $1 billion by 2024. Video-on-demand subscriptions and the music industry are also on the rise, with considerable growth expected in these areas in the coming years.

Sony Ventures plans to offer follow-on investments to its portfolio companies in addition to its seed and early-stage investment strategy. The $10 million fund anticipates ticket sizes ranging from $250,000 to $1 million.

Initially, Sony Innovation Fund: Africa will focus on South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria, and Ghana, with the potential for expansion in the future. The fund’s activities in Africa will be supported by the Sony Ventures team in Europe, with the intention of hiring a full-time member on the continent to manage venture capital sourcing.

Sony Ventures’ commitment to supporting African entertainment startups demonstrates its recognition of the region’s untapped potential and its desire to foster the growth of the entertainment industry in Africa through technology and innovation.

How Sony Ventures Plans to Deploy Its New $10M Fund in African Startups

South African Gaming Startup Carry1st Raises $27M From Top VC Firms

January 18, 2023

Cordel Robbin-Coker, co-founder and chief executive officer (CEO) of Carry1st

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.

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.

“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.

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.

African Development Bank Group’s $140,000 AgriPitch Competition Announces 25 Finalists

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

Why Andreessen Horowitz Made Its First Investment In Africa In Gaming Startup Carry1st

January 21, 2022

Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) has led a $20 million Series A extension for Carry1st, a South African publisher of social games and interactive content across Africa. This is a16z’s first investment in a company based in Africa (the firm has previously invested in Branch and Zipline, companies with some of its operations in Africa but headquartered in the U.S).

Avenir and Google also invested in Carry1st; this is Google’s second check from its Africa Investment Fund.

Nas, as well as the founders of Chipper Cash, Sky Mavis, and Yield Guild Games, were among the notable individual investors who took part.

The round, which is a follow-up to Riot Games, Konvoy Ventures, Raine Ventures, and TTV Capital’s Series A investment in Carry1st in May, saw the same investors increase their stakes in the company.

David Haber and Jonathan Lai, general partners at Andreessen Horowitz, will participate on Carry1st’s board as observers.

“When we think about Carry1st, we want to be the leading consumer internet company in the region. And we think that the best kind of wedge would be able to do that is a combination of gaming and micropayments and online commerce,” CEO Cordel Robbin-Coker said.

“These industries are being pretty significantly disrupted or augmented with web3 and crypto. And as more gaming content starts to integrate with NFTs and cryptocurrencies, we think there’s a really big opportunity to partner with those studios the same way we partner with free-to-play studios.”

On the heels of this revenue growth in its games and marketplace offerings, Carry1st will utilize this funding to expand its content catalog, build its product and engineering teams, and gain “tens of millions” of new customers.

The company said in a statement that it plans to expand into game co-development with studios in order to gain more consumers. It’s also considering constructing infrastructure in Africa to accommodate play-to-earn gaming, which would be its first foray into web3.

Andreessen Horowitz Africa — *L-R: Tinotenda Mundangepfupfu, Lucy Hoffman and Cordel Robbin-Coker. Credits: Carry1st*

Why The Investors Invested

Investors backed Carry1st out of the traction it has acquired within a short time. The three-year-old company recently landed deals for the publication of seven games from six studios globally, including Tilting Point, publisher of Nickelodeon’s SpongeBob: Krusty Cook-Off, which Carry1st recently launched in Africa. Others include CrazyLabs and Sweden’s Raketspel, a studio with over 120 million downloads across its portfolio.

According to the company, its game income also has climbed by 90 percent month over month since the second half of last year. It’s not surprising, given the explosive expansion of games in terms of both number and income (gaming applications represented for nearly 70% of all App Store revenue last year) on both the Apple and Google app stores since the epidemic.

According to Robbin-Coker, the company’s online marketplace is seeing even faster growth, particularly among consumers in South Africa and Nigeria.

“We are delighted to be making our first investment in an Africa-headquartered company in Carry1st, a next-generation mobile games and fintech platform,” David Haber, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz said in a statement. “We see immense opportunity for the company to mirror outstanding successes we’ve seen in markets like India, China, and Southeast Asia. We couldn’t be more thrilled to partner with founders Cordel, Lucy, Tino, and the Carry1st team on their mission to build the Garena of Africa.”

Carry1st appears to have chosen its backers carefully, especially as it wants to expand its gaming, web3, and finance businesses across Africa.

With over $3 billion in assets under management, a16z delivers unrivaled knowledge in gaming and web3. Carry1st will be able to deepen its penetration and engagement in Africa with the support of Google’s goods and phones.

At the same time, following its large investment in Flutterwave, Avenir continues to make a strong push in African fintech.

Individual investors include Nas, who has made a number of crypto investments, and the creators of Axie Infinity, which owns the world’s largest web3 game firm.

A Look At What Carry1st Does

Carry1st was founded in 2018 by Cordel Robbin-Coker, Lucy Hoffman, and Tinotenda Mundangepfupfu. The company, which is located in South Africa and employs 37 people in 18 countries, plans to utilize the new funding to expand its interactive content across Africa.

The company began as a gaming studio, creating, developing (from system designs to artwork and engineering), and releasing mobile games. It evolved into a hybrid model over time, taking on a publishing function while also handling distribution, marketing, and operations.

Since then, Carry1st co-founder and CEO Robbin-Coker said the company has primarily concentrated on its publishing arm.

Carry1st claims to offer a full-stack publishing solution to its partners, including user acquisition, live operations, community management, and monetization.

“We have a full-suite service that starts with distribution and partnerships. We help them create bespoke marketing materials from short-form advertising videos to statics, and we customize their content to resonate with individuals in different countries,” said Robbin-Coker.

“And then we operate the game and we also monetize. So we’ve built out our monetization engine to allow users to be able to pay for content that they want more easily across Africa.”

It also improves monetization in the region with its embedded payment solutions, which allow users to pay using a variety of local payment methods including as bank transfers, cryptocurrency, and mobile money.

Carry1st started its online marketplace for virtual items shortly after finishing its Series A financing. Users of a Carry1st game can buy virtual products including airtime, mobile data, entertainment vouchers, grocery shop vouchers, and gaming currency on this marketplace called Carry1st Shop.

Andreessen Horowitz Africa Andreessen Horowitz Africa

Egypt’s Leading Fintech Fawry Goes To The United States, Plans To Raise $50.8m

Charles Rapulu Udoh

Charles Rapulu Udoh is a Lagos-based lawyer who has advised startups across Africa on issues such as startup funding (Venture Capital, Debt financing, private equity, angel investing etc), taxation, strategies, etc. He also has special focus on the protection of business or brands’ intellectual property rights ( such as trademark, patent or design) across Africa and other foreign jurisdictions.
He is well versed on issues of ESG (sustainability), media and entertainment law, corporate finance and governance.
He is also an award-winning writer

Carry1st Attracts $6m Funding for Africa Expansion

May 11, 2021

South Africa’s emerging mobile games startup, Carry1st which focuses on publishing platforms that enables global gaming studios to unlock the untapped African market, has raised US$6 million in Series A funding to help it scale further. Carry1st was launched in 2019 and based in Cape Town, Carry1st is a mobile games publisher serving the first generation of African smartphone users that has so far reached over 1.5 million users across the region.

The company provides a full stack publishing solution, handling distribution, localisation, user acquisition, marketing, customer experience, and monetisation for its partners. Carry1st’s Pay1st platform is an embedded fintech solution which consolidates the most well-adopted payment methods in six African countries, allowing customers to pay in their preferred way.

Carry1st raised a US$2.5 million seed round last year, and has now taken its total secured investment to US$9.5 million with its Series A raise. The US$6 million round was led by Colorado-based video game VC firm Konvoy Ventures, with participation from Riot Games, Raine Ventures, AET Fund / Akatsuki, and TTV Capital.

The startup will use the funding to secure new partnerships with global gaming studios, launch and scale its existing portfolio of games, and expand its product, engineering, and growth teams.

“We’re excited to partner with this world-class group of investors who, in addition to capital, bring expertise across game development, publishing, and fintech,” said Cordel Robbin-Coker, co-founder and chief executive officer (CEO) of Carry1st. “In 2020, we were able successfully sign seven great titles, recruit a top notch international team, and build out our payments and digital commerce platform. With this investment, we’re positioned to delight millions of users across Africa and the globe.”

Jackson Vaughan, the Konvoy Ventures managing partner who will be joining Carry1st’s board, said the company was helping to bring mobile gaming to Africa by solving for distribution with its payment infrastructure and approaching sub-regions with contextual understanding.

“Cordel, Lucy, and Tino are incredible founders with strong experience on the continent. We’re excited to lead their Series A and support them as they continue to bring joy to their users across the continent,” he said.

Kelechi Deca

Kelechi Deca has over two decades of media experience, he has traveled to over 77 countries reporting on multilateral development institutions, international business, trade, travels, culture, and diplomacy. He is also a petrol head with in-depth knowledge of automobiles and the auto industry

Barely A Year After Raising $2.5m, African Game Publishing Startup Carry1st Lands $6m Series A

May 5, 2021

Africa-focused game publishing startup, Carry1st, which looks to become the continent’s first super app maker, has raised additional $6m, after it first raised $2.5 million seed last year.

“We essentially just got really inspired by some of the dominant demographic trends on the continent,” said Lucy Hoffman, the chief operating officer at Carry1st. “There are over a billion Gen Z and Millennials. Given the influx of cheap smartphones from China, people are coming online for the first time. They’re bypassing laptops, PCs, and consoles and and just going mobile-first. And so we thought it was a really interesting opportunity to get involved in the mobile space, as the cost of data is coming down.”

*Cordell Robbin-Coker (left), Lucy Hoffman, and Tinotenda Mundangepfupfu, all of Carry1st, founded the company in 2018. Source: Carry1st*

Here Is What You Need To Know

Konvoy Ventures led the fundraising round, with Riot Games (creator of League of Legends), Raine Ventures, AET Fund / Akatsuki (creators of Dragon Ball Z), and Japanese fintech TTV Capital participating.

Carry1st plans to use the funds to form new partnerships with international gaming studios, launch and scale its current game portfolio, and develop its product, engineering, and development teams.

With this investment, Konvoy Ventures’ managing partner Jackson Vaughan will also be joining the company’s board.

The company raised a seed round in early 2020 and has since developed a payments platform that will enable users to pay using local payment methods.

Since 2018, it has raised $9.5 million.

Why The Investors Invested

Africa is home to an estimated 1.1 billion millennials and Gen Z. It is also the fastest growing region for mobile game downloads, according to App Annie. This is what prompted the investors to inject $6 million into the startup.

However, it seems the investment appealed to Gordon Rubenstein of Raine Ventures more because of the startup’s team as well as the potential total available market over the next 10 years for mobile gaming in Africa. The investor also said the startup had displayed proven ability to be a leader in Africa’s nascent digital gaming industry.

Based in San Francisco, USA and founded in 2013, Raine Ventures is the venture capital arm of The Raine Group. The company makes seed, early-stage, and later-stage venture investments in the digital media, entertainment, sports, and leisure markets.

For his part, Jackson Vaughan, managing partner at the Colorado-based video game venture capital firm, Konvoy Ventures, said investment into Carry1st came as a result of the startup’s planned delivery of its payment infrastructure.

The number of gamers in Africa is exploding, according to Brendan Mulligan, Riot Games’ head of corporate growth, and Carry1st will bring games to an enthusiastic and relevant audience.

The AET Fund is a Japanese venture capital firm that focuses on the entertainment and technology intersection. The fund aggressively invests in emerging types of entertainment, such as streaming platforms, voice assistants, and the gamification of existing industries, and it extends beyond traditional categories like gaming, music, sports, fashion, and fitness.

Based in Atlanta, Georgia, TTV Capital is an early-stage venture capital firm that invests in fintech companies offering financial products and services.

*Africa is home to four of the top six fastest-growing mobile game markets. Source: App Annie*

A Look At What Carry1st Does

Carry1st— with offices in New York, Lagos, and South Africa — was co-founded in 2018 by Sierra Leonean founder Cordel Robbin-Coker, American Lucy Hoffman, and Zimbabwean software engineer Tinotenda Mundangepfupfu.

Carry1st provides a complete publishing solution, handling distribution, localization, user acquisition, marketing, customer experience and monetization for its partners.

Called Carry1st’s Pay1st, it is an integrated fintech solution that consolidates popular payment methods in six African countries. It allows customers to pay however they want.

Robbin-Coker and Hoffman met while working in investment banking in New York, before forming Carry1st.

In a statement, Robbin-Coker, the startup’s CEO, said the company which is set to sign seven titles in 2021, has recruited an international team and built its digital payment and commerce platform.

Sweden’s Raketspel, which has recorded more than 120 million downloads across all of its games, is among those which signed up. The same goes for the Cosi Games in New York and the Qene Games in Ethiopia.

In the African market, monetization is a major issue, a factor Hoffman claims the company is addressing with its regional fintech focus.

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Charles Rapulu Udoh

Charles Rapulu Udoh is a Lagos-based lawyer who has advised startups across Africa on issues such as startup funding (Venture Capital, Debt financing, private equity, angel investing etc), taxation, strategies, etc. He also has special focus on the protection of business or brands’ intellectual property rights ( such as trademark, patent or design) across Africa and other foreign jurisdictions.
He is well versed on issues of ESG (sustainability), media and entertainment law, corporate finance and governance.
He is also an award-winning writer

South Africa’s Gaming Startup Signs Global Publishing Deal

March 20, 2021

Emerging South Africa’s gaming startup Carry1st has entered into a global, multi-year publishing agreement with Stockholm based Raketspel to publish the studio’s next casual game, Mine Rescue!, to be launched in Spring 2021. With over 120 million downloads of their beloved games including their biggest hit, Dig This! Raketspel has been installed over 100 million times.

Carry1st started making flash games 20 years ago, the studio has evolved to making fun interactive mobile games with simple mechanics that everyone can enjoy. It is an emerging publisher of social games and interactive content with a focus on frontier markets like Africa. The company partners with studios across the globe to scale and monetize its products.

This development marks the third global publishing deal that Carry1st has announced since they raised their seed round in early 2020, and is their first foray into the hybrid-casual space. Speaking on this global publishing deal, Michael Quacinella, Carry1st’s lead product manager who recently joined the company from Wargaming said:“We have been looking for a great hybrid game and after playing Mine Rescue! we immediately felt it was the right one. Raketspel has a lot of experience building exceptional puzzle games and we can’t wait to work together, aiming for the top charts!,”

Johan Henkow, Raketspel CEO added: “We are really excited to start this partnership with Carry1st. Together we can bring the game to a whole new level and reach an even bigger audience worldwide!”

Raketspel and Carry1st are working together to prepare the game for a global launch in the upcoming months. Thereafter, the gaming startup will be responsible for funding and managing user acquisition, distribution, live operations, and community for the game.

In 2020, Carry1st secured $4 million led by CRE Venture Capital to help grow mobile games in Africa. In the same year, the gaming startup secured a global, multi-year partnership with Ethiopia-based developer Qene Games to publish Gebeta.

Kelechi Deca

Kelechi Deca has over two decades of media experience, he has traveled to over 77 countries reporting on multilateral development institutions, international business, trade, travels, culture, and diplomacy. He is also a petrol head with in-depth knowledge of automobiles and the auto industry

Carry1st, South Africa’s Start-up Raises $2.5m Seed Round

May 31, 2020

Efforts Carry1st, a budding Cape Town based startup with offices in Lagos and New York, to use games to build what could be Africa’s first super app has attracted a seed round of $2.5 million. The round which was led by Johannesburg based venture capital (VC) fund CRE Venture Capital had others such as Perivoli Innovations, Chandaria Capital, Lateral Capital and Transsion’s Future Hub, Kam Kronenberg III, among others.

Founded in 2018 by American Lucy Hoffman (formerly Parry) and Sierra Leonean Cordel Robbin-Coker, Carry1st also has Tinotenda Mundangepfupfu, who serves as lead engineer and who joined in January last year, now also listed as a co-founder. The latest seed round brings to $4m the total that Carry1st has raised since its inception in 2018.

In December last year, Robbin-Coker told Ventureburn that Carry1st had raised about $2-million by then from prominent angel investors in Africa and the US whom he didn’t name . The startup said in a statement released today that the investment will go to recruiting new hires, investing in platform technology, and publishing new content. Pardon Makumbe, managing partner at CRE, and Henry Lowenfels, chief product officer of One Team Partners, will join the startup’s board.

Since it launched the app last year, the startup claims to have reached over 1.5 million users across the region. Carry1st Trivia was ranked the number one free-to-play Android game in Nigeria and Kenya and was named the Best Media & Entertainment Solution for 2019.

The company plans to partner with international studios to launch multiple games in 2020 and scale its audience to over a million monthly active users. Said Robbin-Coker in the same statement: “Social gaming is the largest and fastest-growing form of mobile media, grossing more than three times all other app categories combined. Our mission is to bring this world of interactive content to Africa and likewise to connect Africa to the world’, adding that “our belief is that building a local publisher, with differentiated tech and operating capabilities across marketing, distribution, and monetisation is the way to be this bridge,” he said.

Kelechi Deca

Kelechi Deca has over two decades of media experience, he has traveled to over 77 countries reporting on multilateral development institutions, international business, trade, travels, culture, and diplomacy. He is also a petrol head with in-depth knowledge of automobiles and the auto industry

South African Gaming Startup Carry1st Raises $2.5m To Become Africa’s First Super App Maker

May 28, 2020

Africans will soon have access to many more interesting games to choose from as South Africa’s gaming development startup Carry1st which looks to become Africa’s first super app maker, has raised seed round of $2.5 million led by Johannesburg based venture capital (VC) fund CRE Venture Capital.

“We’re looking to be the number one regional publisher of [gaming] content in the region…the publisher of record and the app store,” said Sierra Leonean founder Cordel Robbin-Coker.

Here Is What You Need To Know

Apart from CRE Venture Capital, also participating in this round of funding are Perivoli Innovations, Kenya-based Chandaria Capital, US-based Lateral Capital and Transsion’s Future Hub, Kam Kronenberg III, among others.
The latest investment from CRE Venture Capital brings the company’s total VC to $4 million, which Carry1st will deploy to support and invest in game publishing across Africa.
The startup will use a portion of its latest round and overall capital to bring more unique content onto its platform. “In order to do that, you need cash…to help a developer finish a game or entice a strong game to work with you,” said Robbin-Coker.
The company will also expand its distribution channels, such as partnerships with mobile operators and the Carry1st Brand Ambassador program — a network of sales agents who promote and sell games across the continent.
The company will also invest in the gaming market and itself.

“We want to dedicate at least a million dollars to actually going out and acquiring users and scaling our user base. And then, the final piece is really around the the tech platform that we’re looking to build,” said Robbin-Coker.

Why The Investors Invested

Investor CRE Venture Capital, lead investor in this round has been active on the African startup scene, investing in the continent’s leading startups such as Andela, Flexclub, Rensource, Gokada, Flutterwave, SweepSouth, Safeboda, among others.

“We invest in visionary founders building category-defining tech companies
levered to Africa. We embark on the journey at Seed and Series A rounds. And we stay the course,” the VC notes on its website.

With this investment, Pardon Makumbe, managing partner at CRE, and Henry Lowenfels, chief product officer of One Team Partners, will join the startup’s board.

Read also: Barely A Year After, South African Insurance Startup Inclusivity Solutions Raises $1.3m From Goodwell Investments

A Look At What Startup Carry1st Does

The startup — with offices in New York, Lagos, and South Africa — was co-founded in 2018 by Sierra Leonean founder Cordel Robbin-Coker, American Lucy Parry, and Zimbabwean software engineer Tinotenda Mundangepfupfu.

Robbin-Coker and Parry met while working in investment banking in New York, before forming Carry1st.

Said Robbin-Coker in the same statement:

“Social gaming is the largest and fastest-growing form of mobile media, grossing more than three times all other app categories combined. Our mission is to bring this world of interactive content to Africa and likewise to connect Africa to the world.”

“Our belief is that building a local publisher, with differentiated tech and operating capabilities across marketing, distribution, and monetisation is the way to be this bridge,” he said.

Carry1st looks to match gaming demand in Africa to the continent’s fast growing youth population, improving internet penetration and rapid smartphone adoption.

Carry1st has already launched two games as direct downloads from its site, Carry1st Trivia and Hyper!.

“In April, [Carry1st Trivia] did pretty well. It was the number one game in Nigeria, and Kenya for most of the year and did about one and a half million downloads.” Robbin-Coker said.

Charles Rapulu Udoh

Charles Rapulu Udoh is a Lagos-based lawyer who has advised startups across Africa on issues such as startup funding (Venture Capital, Debt financing, private equity, angel investing etc), taxation, strategies, etc. He also has special focus on the protection of business or brands’ intellectual property rights ( such as trademark, patent or design) across Africa and other foreign jurisdictions.
He is well versed on issues of ESG (sustainability), media and entertainment law, corporate finance and governance.
He is also an award-winning writer.