Lightheart Entertainment, the studio behind the wildly popular arcade game Mr Autofire, today announced it has raised $6.8M in a Series A funding round to scale up its Hypercore games strategy. Helsinki-based Lightheart Entertainment announced today that it has closed a $6.8M (5.6M€) Series A Round led by Makers Fund, with participation from existing investors Galaxy Interactive, Sisu Game Ventures, and additional angel investors.
The round will enable the company to continue building more games in the model of its first title, Mr Autofire, to help continue its strong growth. Lightheart Entertainment was founded in 2019 by a core team of mobile game veterans to innovate on the newly emerging segment of Hypercore - games that combine the intuitive and approachable gameplay of hypercasual titles with the deeper metagame and live operations of mid-core games. This has allowed the team to dig into vast swathes of classic, fun gameplay genres and build modern takes of them.
The key to achieving this vision has been the company’s focus on building the development teams to be as autonomous and self-organizing as possible. From conception and development to live operations and marketing, all aspects of building the game happen within the core team. This ensures that important decisions are made efficiently by the team that is actually making the game rather than spread across a complex organization. “Lightheart is one of the few companies to successfully execute in the "Hypercore" game genre,” said Jay Chi, Founding Partner of Makers Fund. “We've known Lightheart for a while now and believe that their unique culture and rapid iterative and autonomous approach to game development is a key factor in that success."
Lightheart’s first game, Mr Autofire, combines classic platformer gameplay with modern touchscreen controls and collection metagame. So far, the game has steadily grown since it launched in November 2019. Fifteen months later, the game has been downloaded five million times and has generated over ten million USD in revenue. “We’ve done away with the concept of soft launches and global launches. When we select a prototype to turn into a game, we make it a priority to learn everything we can about it. For us, that means testing as soon as we humanly can - on our primary market – letting the audience tell us if what we’ve built works for them. We start marketing at a low rate and gradually learn, grow, and iterate,” says Kalle Kaivola, CEO of Lightheart.
Currently, the company is scaling up its hiring and building prototypes for what will eventually become the company’s second game.
About Lightheart Entertainment
Lightheart Entertainment is a Helsinki-based mobile game company founded in 2019 that is pioneering Hypercore games and building a culture of powerful decision-making and ownership for the whole team. The company has released its first game, Mr Autofire, to commercial success and is on the path to building more. Lightheart has twelve employees and is constantly on the lookout for talented developers at https://careers.lightheart.games.
About Makers Fund
Makers Fund is a global interactive entertainment venture capital firm focused on early-stage investments. With over 60 portfolio companies to date, Makers is dedicated to furthering growth and innovation in the interactive entertainment industry. Makers Fund provides strong portfolio support and value add with direct access to top talent, advisors, and CEOs of global platforms.
Press Kit: http://bit.ly/Lightheart