Carbonated Raises an $8.5m Seed Round Led by Andreessen Horowitz, Golden Ventures and BITKRAFT Ventures
We founded Carbonated in 2015 with proven industry veterans from Zynga, Electronic Arts and Blizzard. Our studio is located in El Segundo, a small beach community on the Los Angeles coast where people walk (yup, some people do walk in LA). We haven’t been there much these days — although we’re fortunate to be able to work from home in these difficult times.
The reason we started the company was that as folks with busy lives and living rooms, we missed playing hardcore competitive games on console and PC. We realized pretty quickly that we’re not the only ones and there’s a huge underserved market which continues to grow as younger core gamers age up and enter the workforce, like we did.
To reach this market, we’re first targeting mobile as it’s the ideal platform for people with busy lives. Mobile has a massive audience with over 2.6B gamers who will account for roughly half of the total $160B industry revenue in 2020. The challenge historically has been most hardcore games aren’t natively designed for mobile (i.e., lots of buttons and virtual d-pads).
We’re solving this challenge by designing a hardcore mobile experience that uses AI and our live-ops tech to enable ease of play (even if one hand is holding a frosty beverage).
Our team has a lot of experience running live-ops games, and we knew we needed something powerful and flexible to power these new types of experiences — so we built “Carbyne”. Carbyne is our live-ops platform with advanced tools that enable us to quickly create and modify all forms of content (including AI) and deliver it to players with no downtime.
In early 2019 we demo’d a bit of this at Amazon’s GDC booth, and we’ve been working closely with Amazon Game Tech ever since.
I’m extremely proud of what our small team has accomplished, but once we started getting positive feedback from players and industry experts, we decided it was time to go faster and grow the team to fully execute on the vision.
To that end, we’re excited to announce that we just closed a seed round of $8.5M led by Andreessen Horowitz, Golden Ventures, BITKRAFT Ventures, AH Cultural Leadership Fund, as well as angel investors and advisors including Mark Pincus, Kent Wakeford, Shanti Bergel and Chris Ye.
Our partner criteria has always been more than just purely financial. We look for people with deep industry experience who are willing to roll up their sleeves and dig in. We’re thrilled to have partners like that around the table who believe in our team and mission.
Until we announce more details about the game, rest assured that we’re building something that delivers intense real-time multiplayer action, pushes graphic fidelity, and allows you to form alliances with your friends all over the world. All with one hand.
If you’re an industry professional and want to apply to join the team — or simply want to learn more about the game — please visit us at www.carbonated.com
Thanks for reading!
