This story is sponsored by Foxy Bingo
NewGame Capital, the online gaming-focused venture capital fund backed by bwin.party and advised by the founders of Foxy Bingo, has made its second investment, in mobile gaming business AlchemyBet.
Sheffield-based AlchemyBet, which according to CEO James Harrison has been in “stealth mode” since mid-2011 developing a suite of HTML5 slot games and a new gambling platform, is soon to launch new consumer-facing brand Poker Fruity, which will also offer games from other well-known third-party developers.
Harrison told Casino Choice that his company was “delighted” to be the latest investment from NewGame Capital ahead of the launch of Poker Fruity. “This will all be backed up by a significant TV advertising campaign and we are very excited to be able to benefit from the knowledge of Simon Collins and Patrick Southon with their experience at taking gambling products to the mass market. They have also helping instruct our strategy by sharing some of the learnings from their existing investments in the social gaming space.”
Harrison added that the most exciting development of its new B2C offering from his company’s perspective “will be the revolutionary new ‘player lobby’ which we believe will prove to be a genuinely disruptive innovation,” he told Casino Choice.
NewGame’s Simon Collins, who with Patrick Southon founded Foxy Bingo parent company Cashcade before selling it to bwin.party for nearly £96m in 2009, said at the annual Online Bingo Summit in London on Friday that mobile gambling operator AlchemyBet would be looking to “take some of the social components that you find in games like Diamond Dash and Bubble Witch Saga” and integrate these into its instant-win content.
Collins added that he and Southon “had about 500-600 plans come across our desk” since they started working in earnest on establishing the investment fund with bwin.party in January last year. ” There’s a lot of appetite for innovation out there, and our key focus is mobile and social”, said Collins, who also revealed NewGame had backed its first venture, Avatingo-developed product beJig, to the tune of “about £1.5m so far”.
The former Cashcade owner however emphasised that NewGame was supporting its portfolio of companies with more than just cash: “The idea being that we could really get involved and help them take their business forward with connections, licensing, payment processing, things that most of the people in this room are very familiar with, but when you talk to young start-ups, they don’t have the first idea what they would do about tax or how to market and promote their services.”
Digital gaming fund NewGame, which officially launched last September with a £15m commitment from bwin and PartyPoker brand owner bwin.party and £1m from its investment team, is also advised by merchant bank NewShore Partners.
