India's Moonfrog Labs acquired by Swedish gaming studio

The acquisition will be a staged process, with Stillfront taking a 91% interest in an initial tranche for $90 million. That transaction is expected to close within the month. The remaining 9% will be acquired across no more than three additional tranches.

Compensation in the first tranche is equivalent to about 6x Moonfrog's unaudited adjusted EBITDA for 2020. Consideration for each of the subsequent tranches will be based on EBITDA between 2021 and 2023.

Key employees of Moonfrog will remain with the business and be part of the management team after the first tranche closes.

The start-up received $15 million from Tiger and Sequoia in 2015 with a view to expanding its game portfolio. Business development activity since then has included the launch of Ludo Club and Jalebi, both board game-style titles. The overall portfolio has grown to more than 20 games, mainly based on traditional board and card games, which are popular in the region.

Moonfrog posted a preliminary unaudited revenue of about $21 million and adjusted EBITDA of $12 million for the first three quarters of 2020. This represents an increase of 7% on Stillfront's total net revenue and a 10% increase on Stillfront's total adjusted EBIT for the same period.

"With the acquisition of Moonfrog, Stillfront adds a highly profitable and successful studio to the group and expands our geographic footprint to the Indian Subcontinent, a strategic move into one of the fastest-growing mobile game markets worldwide," Jorgen Larsson, CEO of Stillfront, said in a statement.

"Moonfrog provides us with a proven platform with experienced talent to build upon and an exciting potential to expand other Stillfront free-to-play games into the Indian subcontinent."

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• Topics
• South Asia
• Consumer
• Exits
• Trade sale
• India
• Tiger Global Management
• Sequoia Capital
• gaming
• TMT