Growing Sanlo: Announcing our Series A and $200m non-dilutive growth capital fund dedicated to game and app developers 🎮
Today we are excited to announce Sanlo, a company dedicated to increasing the success rate and profitability levels of millions of game and app developers around the world. We’ve dedicated the past year to working closely with some of the world’s best developers and building a financial operating system (OS) that democratizes access to capital and makes financial insights readily available. Our close collaboration with the community has guided us in the creation of a full stack of financial products tailored for developers.
We are proud of the relationships we’ve built with developers and through that, helped them to scale their games and apps: the game developer that needed non-dilutive capital to reach and onboard more players into the game (with the payback of that capital being tied to UA payback), another game developer that was looking for predictable non-dilutive capital to finance the development of their expanding portfolio of games, the subscription consumer app developer that wanted additional financial bandwidth to bring economy designers on board to tighten monetization, the large game publisher that was looking to consolidate and gain visibility into cash flows from multiple platforms, and many more.
THE PROBLEMS
During our days in gaming at EA, PlayStation and Playfish, we had the opportunity to experience firsthand the joys and challenges of building a game and bringing it to market. You need to find the right concept that people will love (which may take multiple iterations and months), build the right experience for the right audience, master different aspects of the game / app economy and figure out a way to reach the right audience. You need to build a team and company around it and then finance it.
There have been important tectonic shifts affecting the industry — from events such as Epic v Apple ruling to the expansion of distribution platforms and ways to onboard and engage players. We are at the inflection point when developers are positioned to get more empowerment and control of how they build and grow.
Yet, even as the gaming and larger creator industry continues to grow — with gaming alone generating more than $300 billion in revenue in 2021 and attracting more than 3.24 billion gamers — small and medium-sized developers still have to navigate a convoluted network of financial products. These products possess no empathy for their unique business needs, and come with complex terms that offer more questions than answers. How do they work, how much money and time will it cost and therefore, how much value will it ultimately bring?
THE SANLO SOLUTION
To rise to this challenge, we created Sanlo. Sanlo is a financial OS for game and app developers on a mission to bring financial independence and control. We are a technology company built by operators that prioritized transparency, efficiency and scalability in every feature and product we create.
We understand the work that needs to be done, because we’ve done it ourselves.
Our first product is a platform that combines financial insights about a company and its products with frictionless access to non-dilutive capital for scalable growth. Staying true to our ethos of bringing simplicity and clarity to everything we build, developers securely connect data sources and within hours have their data in a single destination that lets them receive and manage non-dilutive growth capital.
Sanlo is not a VC fund that takes equity in exchange for funding, or a lender that charges compounding interest, or a publisher that participates in the development. In other words, Sanlo’s capital does not cost developers equity, creative control, and time and money on complex debt instruments.
Our success is measured by our ability to help developers easily identify opportunities for growth and act on it. We have an ambitious roadmap to execute in the coming months as we reimagine the financial products that empower developers around the world. We take pride in being able to provide speedy and frictionless access to capital as our first product.
EXCITING NEWS
We are thrilled to have Konvoy lead our $10M Series A round and to have strong support from all our existing investors (Initial Capital, Portage Ventures, XYZ Venture Capital, London Venture Partners, Index Ventures) and new investors (Fin Capital, GFR Fund and a number of angel investors).
We have also partnered with HCGFunds to expand our pool of capital to $200m so make it available for developers to scale. HCGFunds has been a fantastic partner and one of the most knowledgeable groups of people about credit products and needs of independent businesses.
We are proud to be continually supported by some of the best minds in both the gaming and fintech industries. “We see Sanlo as the first player building a truly full stack of financial products with a clear focus on the needs of the game and app developers. Their first product of non-dilutive capital dramatically changes the funding landscape for the developers, globally. With an ample amount of data available for the underwriting processes, it is well overdue for the developers to have access to non-dilutive funding that is speedy and clear,” said Josh Chapman, Managing Partner at Konvoy. “We believe Sanlo is well positioned to bring a viable solution that is fantastic for a massive demographic of game and app creators as they grow. We are thrilled to be in their corner.”
Our funding will help fuel developer growth by providing non-dilutive growth capital. We’ll also be using the funding to continue growing, scale our team and continue building out more products for the community. To learn more about Sanlo or to sign up, please visit us at sanlo.io.
We’ve been incredibly lucky to have created an amazing team of great humans to build important stuff, while having fun and hanging out in real life and remotely. We are looking for great people to join us — check out our careers page.
