News Roundup: Gaming company Lootcakes raised $2M, more
Hello there! We have some exciting news to share with you from August and September. According to PitchBook’s Q2 2020 Global League Tables, SOSV is currently the most active venture capital firm in the world despite COVID19, with 80 investments in total globally. Also, four Chinaccelerator portfolio companies raised a new round, two of which will join our program in September. The four startups are doing extensive work in digital health, gaming, video content, and SaaS.
SOSV – The Accelerator VC was ranked as the most active venture capital firm in the world.
SOSV is a global venture capital firm providing multi-stage investment to develop and scale our founders’ big ideas for positive change. We invest in 150 companies every year through our world class vertical accelerator programs, including Chinaccelerator, MOX – Mobile Only Accelerator, HAX, FoodX, IndieBio, dlab.
Our intensive 3-6 month programs provide startups with seed capital, a specialized global staff of engineers, designers, and scientists to accelerate product development, mentors with deep market and technical expertise, and an unparalleled infrastructure of fully outfitted laboratory & maker spaces.
We help startups go further, faster.
TravelFlan partners with Samsung Electronics for lifestyle e-commerce solutions.
SOSV Chinaccelerator portfolio company TravelFlan developed Ara Buddy to offer contact-free day-to-day consumer focused content and service for Samsung Smartphones in South Korea. Service scope and markets will be expanded from local activities and consumer focused product and service to food & dine service and much more. Ara Buddy, the all-in-one ecosystem hits the market by over 120% growth in active users MoM and over 7% overall conversion despite COVID19.
Leveraging AI and big data, TravelFlan helps corporates to unlock the power of travel as a tool to monetize their user base. Since COVID19, TravelFlan has developed lifestyle e-commerce business on their platform.
Gaming company Lootcakes raised $2M to reward VIP gamers who share their data
Our portfolio company Lootcakes (Batch 12) just raised $2 million, led by Konvoy Ventures, with participation from SOSV and GAN Ventures.
The New York-based Lootcakes requires players to share their private data through a reward program – taking the gift cards to buy things in games, which creates a lucrative target market for advertisers who have new games to show — without sacrificing user privacy.
Lootcakes found out that only 1% of players in each free-to-play game generally account for 80% of in-app purchase revenue. Advertisers would of course love to target the spenders to new games. And last year, advertisers spent $10 million targeting Lootcakes’ audiences, and this year it is expected to be $25 million.
“These players are driving the ecosystem, the economic health of gaming companies,” CEO Matt Littin said. “We are helping these valuable consumers to fully realize their value in the ecosystem and get benefit of their data instead of passively giving it away.”
Lootcakes senior team: Dan Laughlin (president and COO); Matt Littin (cofounder and CEO);
and David Schleupner (cofounder and CTO).
Image Credit: Lootcakes
Digital health company Mobio Interactive raised a $1.8M Seed funding round
Our portfolio company Mobio Interactive (Batch 12) announced a seed funding round led by Singapore-based Verge HealthTech Fund along with Atlas Asset Management, Creative Ventures and SOSV, closed with $1.8 million. The funds will be used to advance the deep tech and clinical validation of Am Mindfulness, the company’s digital therapeutic meditation app which helps to better quantify users’ stress via computer vision and machine learning instead of wearable devices.
Video meta-tagging platform Toch has raised over $1M from SOSV, 9 Unicorns Fund, and Inflection Point Ventures
The Mumbai-based company Toch (Batch 18) has raised over $1 million in its latest round of funding, from investors including SOSV and its accelerator, Chinaccelerator, 9 Unicorns Fund, and Inflection Point Ventures, to further deepen its tech infrastructure, and grow its team.
The company is going to join Chinaccelerator’s Batch 18 program in September. Toch, is a video platform that helps online video creators, media companies, advertisers, and OTT platforms optimise their videos and meta-tags by using AI and deep learning. The company also helps broadcasters monetise live events, provide auto subtitles for live events in different languages based on the viewer’s location, and enable automatic meta-tagging.
“Having SOSV on board will help Toch to expand in the global market,” Saket Dandotia, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Toch, said.
Toch’s website
Indore SaaS startup BuildPan raises $500K in seed round, valuation jumps to $5M
App development and testing platform BuildPan (Batch 18) has raised $500,000 from SOSV, along with 9point8 and PayPal India Head.
BuildPan’s AI engine helps with providing auto-suggestions to developers that allow teams to rapidly build and deploy quality apps in both Android and iOS operating systems.
BuildPan will join Chinaccelerator’s Batch 18 program together with Toch in September.
BuildPan Team: (L-R) Virendra Chouhan, Sonal Dandotia, Vaibhav Tiwari, Anthony Wentzel