Mobile gaming startup HeYou Games has closed a round of financing led by Cabiedes & Partners, which also includes the participation of various London-based investors. The company has declined to name such investors or to reveal the size of the investment.
This deal represents HeYou Games’ first round from institutional investors.
The Madrid-based startup was founded by Maria Aguilera (formerly of Kimia and Vodafone) and Jose Manuel Garcia Franco, who served as Pyro Studios’ game director for more than a decade.
The project was born inside mobile marketing platform Kimia in September 2013, but it wasn’t until last summer that the company was spun off, coinciding with the launch of its first game, LikWit.
The game was first launched in Australia over the summer for beta testing purposes, and since last week it’s widely available on the iOS app store. HeYou Games claims that so far it’s been downloaded more than 100,000 times. More games will be launched soon, according to the company.
Co-founder Garcia Franco concedes that the mobile gaming space is quite crowded at the moment and poses various challenges. “First and foremost, there’s a visibility issue, as finding new games is not an easy task at all”, he says. “And second, there’s a ton of competition out there, which makes it hard to differentiate yourself from others and to attract users”.
Despite these challenges, Maria Aguilera says that their “extreme focus on data analytics” will help them stand out from competitors. “We’re constantly tracking various user-related KPIs to see how users play our games and what their behaviour is”, she explains. This data analytics approach, they say, will allow them to quickly adapt to consumers and to improve their products.
HeYou Games investment is Cabiedes’ first one in the mobile gaming space. Up until now, the firm had mostly been focused on ecommerce and B2C companies.