Artie Set To Disrupt $80B Mobile Gaming Industry By Eliminating The Need For Apps
Chad Hurley, Mark Pincus, Scooter Braun, Kevin Durant and Rich Kleiman’s Thirty Five Ventures Back Next-Gen Instant Gaming Platform Artie.
Artie, a platform for next-gen instant mobile games, today announced a $10M seed round that includes a diverse group of top investors from gaming, technology, sports, and entertainment. Artie’s technology enables high-quality mobile games to be played directly inside social media, video, and messaging platforms without any additional app downloads, API access, or integration needed. The company — with team members from Activision/Blizzard, Jam City, Playtika, Infinity Ward, Disney, Snap, Mozilla, and Facebook — is focused on making mobile games easier to discover and play for consumers while improving the economics of mobile games for developers and creators.
Artie’s platform benefits the mobile gaming industry which has long yearned for an alternate distribution solution to app stores and their 30% fees. It also opens a new revenue stream for celebrities, athletes, music artists, influencers, and creators by enabling them to bring branded games directly to their audiences. Artie has quietly built its platform over the past 18 months with plans to unveil it to the world along with an initial slate of games later this spring.
Artie’s latest backers include Zynga founder, Mark Pincus; Kevin Durant and Rich Kleiman‘s Thirty Five Ventures; music mogul Scooter Braun‘s Raised In Space; Shutterstock founder, Jon Oringer; Tyler & Cameron Winklevoss; ByteDance’s largest early backer, Susquehanna International Group; Harris Blitzer Sports & Entertainment + The Sixers Lab; and Manuel Bronstein, VP of Product at Google; and YouTube founder, Chad Hurley.
“A key part of YouTube’s early growth strategy was making sure our videos could be shared and played anywhere without friction. Artie is taking the same approach for high-quality mobile games,” said Hurley.
Additional backers include; early SpaceX, Uber, and Niantic backer, Cyan Banister; Founders Fund; Warner Music Group; game industry thought-leader, Matthew Ball; Niv Dror‘s Shrug Capital; and top executives from Amazon, Twitter, and Square.
This latest capital will enable Artie to continue advancing its technology platform and launch an initial slate of games in 2021.
Artie has forged several key partnerships with celebrities, athletes, and influencers for its initial slate of games, which will be distributed across social media, video, and messaging platforms. They include a choose-your-own-adventure-style mobile game with a big superhero IP, an innovative puzzle game based on Alice in Wonderland, a multiplayer/social virtual beer pong game, and a collaborative party game.
“Consumers discover the vast majority of their content from friends and the people they follow, but games are the only kind of content that require you to go download separate apps. Artie’s technology completely upends this paradigm, allowing consumers to play high-quality mobile games the instant they discover them,” said Artie co-founder and CTO Armando Kirwin.
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Image: Artie co-founders Ryan Horrigan and Armando Kirwin will be unveiling new games in 2021 including a choose-your-own-adventure-style mobile game with a big superhero IP, an innovative puzzle game based on Alice in Wonderland, a multiplayer/social virtual beer pong game, and a collaborative party game. To learn more, visit www.artie.com.