SIG leads $100m round for China gaming platform MetaApp
China gaming platform MetaApp has raised a $100 million Series C round led by SIG and featuring existing investors China Creation Ventures (CCV) and Sky9 Capital. It is said to be the largest single round in China's gaming industry.
MetaApp is similar to US online game platform Roblox, which allows users to program their own games and play games created by others. Roblox went public in the US on March 10 via a direct listing and ended its first day of trading with a market capitalization of $38 billion.
MetaApp's latest funding round will be used to accelerate the construction of a new type of creative community based on multi-person real-time interactive services. The platform provides basic game design tools, cloud services, R&D subsidies, and access to user traffic for marketing purposes, according to Sen Hu, the company's co-founder and CEO.
CCV is the largest external shareholder, having led the Series A in 2018 and re-upped for the next two rounds. "The founding team is pursuing an online entertainment-plus-social platform model. It is possible to develop many interactive products, depending on the game. This model can serve digital citizens around the world - the scope for imagination is limitless," said Wei Zhou, founding partner of CCV.
Founded in 2016, MetaApp has developed a sandbox platform for mobile games. A sandbox game involves nonlinear gameplay that presents players with challenges that can be completed in different sequences. This means there are different paths to victory and even different types of victory.
"In e-commerce, what people really need are high-quality products at low prices, rather than something that is over-advertised. MetaApp wants to do the same in gaming. Content is king. The company will not recommend any games for the purpose of making money, only when they are high quality," said Zhewu Zhou, another co-founder of MetaApp.
Other investment activity in this space includes a RMB300 million ($42 million) Series B round for Reworld last year. The company operates a platform that allows users to design their own video games, offering training and IT tools.
Lighthouse Capital served as the exclusive financial advisor for MetaApp's latest round.
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