🎮 Backing Homa Again
Overlooked #126
Hi, it’s Alexandre from Eurazeo. I’m investing in seed & series A consumer and consumer enablers startups all over Europe. Overlooked is a weekly newsletter about venture capital and underrated consumer trends. Today, I’m thrilled to share that our portfolio company Homa raised a $100m series B to move forward in its vision to create the next European gaming giant.
We’re delighted to announce that our portfolio company Homa raised a $100m series B co-led by Headline and Quadrille with the participation of existing investors Northzone, Singular and Eurazeo as well as new investors Fabric and BPI! I covered Homa twice in the newsletter to talk about its seed round and its series A round
As a reminder, Homa was founded in 2018 by Daniel Nathan (CEO) and Olivier Lebas (COO) as a platform to create and publish mobile games. In 4 years, Homa has built a team with 160+ employees from 34 different countries and has published 80+ games which have generated over 1bn downloads!
We’ve been working with Homa’s team for almost 3 years and we’ve always been impressed by Homa’s ruthless execution speed and ability to bring A-players on board. In the past 12 months, we’ve been super excited to bring top talents on board like Ioana (CPO), Brice (VP Marketing), Jeff (VP Corp Dev) and Romain (web 3 lead).
Homa is becoming the partner of choice for mobile game developers handling everything besides game development - usually done on Unity. Homa has a developer platform called Homa Lab with the following features for mobile game developers: learning to code a mobile game, getting inspiration for your next game with trending ideas and market intelligence, having analytics about your game, testing your game, scaling and monetising your game. With Homa Lab, mobile game developers maximise their chances to produce a game hit by combining their creativity with Homa’s data and automation tools.
Homa started to operate in the hyper-casual gaming genre because it was the easiest genre to penetrate and to build a developer platform for. Homa is progressively expanding its scope to more casual games:
It has created a mobile game sub-genre called idle arcade which has become extremely popular (8 games generating 1m+ downloads in the past 12 months). In idle arcade games, the friction to collect ressources and perform actions is massively reduced compared to traditional arcade games. As a result, these games are easy to start with like hyper-casaual games but they have a deeper gameplay which implies that mid to long term retentions will be higher and that gamers can be monetise not only with advertising but also with In-App-Purchases (IAP).
It has recently partnered with mobile gaming studios in more casual gaming categories like Merry Realm for a card game or Turbo Labz for a chess game or Fusee for a merge game.
It has built a web-3 team to explore several initiatives to bring web-3 within mobile gaming with an accessible and fun gameplay which are 2 recurring characteristics of Homa’s games. In 2022, Homa partnered with Sorare to build mobile game experiences around Sorare’s soccer NFT cards.
Homa will use the funding to strengthen the team, to pursue growth projects beyond the hyper-casual segment and to double down on its developer platform Homa Lab! If you’re interested to work at Homa, please do send me a message at adewez@eurazeo.com.
Thanks to Julia for the feedback! 🦒 Thanks for reading! See you next week for another issue! 👋