Jambox Games, a Singapore-based competitive game publishing platform for indie developers, announced that it has secured $1.1 million in a seed funding round led by Turkish gaming investor Ludus Venture Studio and participated in by multiple angel investors. The seed fund will help Jambox launch its next-generation competitive game publishing platform for indie game developers in India and Southeast Asia.
The startup was founded in 2020 by Vikas Gulati, a tech industry veteran who has gained over 22 years of experience in adtech, gaming, and startups. Aside from building multiple startups in Asia, Gulati also brings in his experience from holding regional managing director positions at AdColony and Opera.
“Building a successful gaming franchise is more science than art. There is a huge gap and market opportunity for an independent platform that can power developers and their games to compete at the global level. Growth, user acquisition, analytics, and monetization have become a ‘big boys’ club’, said Gulati, who is also Jambox’s Chief Executive Officer.
He added: “Southeast Asia has tremendous talent and developers understand their users intimately. Some of the games developed have huge potential with multiplayer and social formats. Developers just need the right partner and platform to grow the games.”
Volkan Bicer, a Partner at Ludus Venture Studio weighs in on the company’s investment in the game publishing startup: “We are extremely excited to participate in the fast-growing gaming market of SEA and India. Gaming is now established as mainstream entertainment. Vikas is a rare talent with visionary leadership and great execution capabilities. Jambox Games is solving a real developer pain point for emerging markets like India and Southeast Asia. With its unique “East to West” focus of bringing titles from emerging Southeast Asia to the Western markets, Jambox Games has the ability to emerge as a market leader.”
Jambox is planning to release a toolkit that integrates, attribution, user acquisition, and monetization to help game developers concentrate on releasing quality games. The company focuses on casual and hyper-casual games that are popular in Singapore among Gen Z, Millennials, and female gamers. Aside from its kits, Jambox also plans to provide a custom competitive format to improve revenue and retention.
Gulati expounds on the services and products Jambox wants to provide for developers: “We’re trying to build an independent game publishing platform that can help indie developers to take their games global. We offer them the best-in-class suite of tools around user acquisition, analytics, monetization. We’re also doing what I call a competitive gaming format. So we are looking at building a meta software development kit (SDK) solution that can help convert single-player games into multiplayer games for the game developers.”
The Seed fund will be used to fuel the startup’s next-generation competitive game publishing platform for indie game developers specifically in India and Southeast Asia. Jambox plans to launch the platform and establish roots in Vietnam, India, and Indonesia before moving towards launching in Malaysia, Thailand, and the Philippines.
Featured image credits: Unsplash