Romanian game design startup Machinations.io raised $3.3 million in Series A funding round led by European venture capital firm Hiro Capital and follow-on investments by Acequia Capital, Venrex Investment Management and GapMinder.
Machinations.io develops a global browser-based platform to design and predict game economies and systems for premium, free2play, and play2earn games. The company plans to use the latest investment to grow its team and to launch new features and services to support the rapid development of the number of users.
“We’re humbled to be backed by such reputed VCs and have their confidence in our vision and role within the games industry and beyond. We’re growing our team and rolling out integrations with the most popular in-game telemetry providers and Web3 marketplaces, pushing towards our goal of becoming the standard for game economy modeling, forecasting and optimisation”, said Mihai Gheza, co-founder and CEO at Machinations.io.
The startup has attracted so far about $5 million of funding. Before this Series A round, Machinations.io raised $1.6 million in funding from Seedcamp, GapMinder, Acequia Capital and several top angel investors.
The platform is currently used by more than 35,000 professionals, having built one of the largest game design communities out there.
“We first invested in Machinations.io in 2020, in a round that we led. We continue to support the founders due to the uniqueness of the product they created. This product completely changes the way games are made and designed and implicitly how the largest entertainment industry develops”, said Cosmin Ochișor, partner at GapMinder, a €50M venture capital fund that invests in technology companies created in Romania and Central Europe.
Founded in 2018 by Mihai Gheza, Dana Gheza, Radu Crăciun, Alin Moldovan and Joris Dormans, professor at Leiden University Center for the Arts in Society (Netherlands), the startup originated as a Ph.D. research at the University of Amsterdam in 2012 by one of its co-founders, and it has since spread organically through more than 400 academic institutions worldwide.
Machinations.io is one of the rising gaming startups from the region, together with many new and exciting startups in the industry coming from countries such as Serbia, Bulgaria and Croatia.
