– ISRAEL, Tel Aviv – Kooply, a stealth-mode game platform enabling creative expression through mobile games and experiences, today announced $18 million in seed funding co-led by TPY Capital and M12, as well as Playtika (NASDAQ: PLTQ) alongside Aleph Venture Partners, Entrée Capital, Glilot Capital Partners, and Samsung Next.
Concurrent with the financing, Dekel Persi and Guy Yamen from TPY Capital, Irad Dor from M12, and Raz Friedman from Playtika have joined its Board of Directors.
The capital will be used to further grow the team and bring product to market.
“Kooply embodies everything TPY Capital seeks in a startup: a visionary, yet grounded team with mutual entrepreneurial backgrounds, and a proximity to the challenges mobile developers face,” said Dekel Persi, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of TPY Capital. “Add to that a bold perspective on how to democratize game development and favorable trends such as the growth of UGC in game development, as well as the prominence of mobile in this space, and this becomes an extremely compelling story.”
“We believe Kooply has the potential to create an entirely new gaming category that can capture hundreds of millions of users,” said M12 Partner Irad Dor. “Kooply is tapping into a rapidly growing market that has been disrupted by technological advances in mobile networks, devices, and consumer behavior. They understand how to meet users where they are, with compelling content they’ll want to stay and engage with. The ability to create for the mobile domain first will be increasingly valuable as the metaverse becomes more established and consumers seek new experiences.”
Eric Rapps, Chief Strategy Officer at Playtika, adds, “As a company, we strongly believe in encouraging and supporting visionary gaming entrepreneurs. What stood out most about Kooply’s approach was its focus on mobile native creation specifically and the ease of use of its tools not just to create experiences, but also to operate these experiences after their creation. As an industry leader in mobile games and live operations, Playtika understands the importance and complexity of running games as a service long after the original product creation. Kooply is one of the few companies to understand the game management challenges and lower the barriers to operate user-generated content and games as a creator.”
About Kooply
Founded in 2021 by Ido Yablonka, Vadim Zak, and Guy Pitelko, for whom this is the second startup together, having previously sold ClarityRay to Yahoo. The company is headquartered in Tel Aviv and has assembled a world-class leadership team dedicated to leading the next wave of mobile game development. Yablonka, the company’s CEO and co-founder, has led six previous exits to companies including Palo-Alto Networks, Tencent, and Yahoo – of which he was also the Israeli GM, and VP of Product for Yahoo Search, a multi-billion dollar business. Kooply also added Ido Schwartzman to its team as CTO. Schwartzman has decades of gaming experience and is the former chief architect of CrazyLabs, a top-3 global mobile gaming developer and publisher recently acquired for $200 million. Another key appointment is Eyal Biran joining as director of product, until recently head of streaming product at Overwolf, a gaming content platform which had raised $150M to date. Kooply plans to triple its employee base over the next six months.
Kooply is a stealth-mode startup with the mission of bringing together players, creators, and developers in a mobile-centric community. Addressing industry challenges like game development, art, monetization, and distribution from an entirely new perspective, Kooply allows creators to build the games they desire with help from a community of gamers and developers. Kooply was founded in 2021 and is headquartered in Tel Aviv, Israel.
For more information: https://kooply.com/
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