Cape Town-based Launch Africa has made its first ever investment into a gaming-tech venture with Skrmiish, the world’s first mobile play-to-earn app. This, as Skrmiish begins to wrap up a $2.5 million series A funding round.
Founded in South Africa in 2018, Skrmiish gained a global following by giving gamers from anywhere in the world an opportunity to make money on the blockchain playing the games they love. This, warned co-founder Chris Heaton in an earlier interview, is not to be confused with gambling.
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As a leading Pan-African venture capital fund, Launch Africa joins the Singapore-based Blockchain Founders Fund and Stellar in this equity funding round. Skrmiish is expected to announce additional investors soon.
Launch Africa – the first institutional investor in this round – believes the seed funding enables Skrmiish to accelerate scalability by integrating additional game titles, grow its monthly revenue, launch into North and Latin America and complete the preparation to issue its own Skrmiish token.
Zachariah George, managing partner at Launch Africa Ventures, says as one of Africa’s most prominent and active early-stage funds, they are acutely aware of the fact that the median age of the African population is 18, versus 42 in Europe, 35 in North America and 31 in Asia.
He says, “A combination of having the world’s fastest growing youth population together with an exponential increase in digital skills transfer and connectivity amongst the youth, puts young Africans in pole position to be both the leading consumers and creators of content in the competitive video gaming world by 2030. The Skrmiish team are well positioned to tap into the huge market for skill-based games where we can finally see the true democratisation and monetisation of young gaming talent.”
Investment into Skrmiish will also lead to the hiring of additional talent to bolster the already high-ranking team and continue to drive the company forward.
Skrmiish boasts 100 000 players
Since launching its free-to-play offering into the market in 2021, Skrmiish has acquired more than 100 000 players across more than 100 jurisdictions around the globe.
The company has since switched on its unique MoneyMatch feature allowing players to earn real cash in every match they play without having to wait for a tournament or find a peer to challenge.
Live across the United Kingdom and other parts of Europe and targeting more than half a billion players currently, MoneyMatch combines a traditional sportsbook approach with traditional AAA+ game play. Players get their MoneyMatch rating based off performance data once they have synced Skrmiish with their game accounts.
The game-tech start-up also boasts the world’s first competitive gaming wallet built on the blockchain. This means that the company’s financial infrastructure is FCA regulated and built with bank grade security, allowing users to be in complete control of their earnings and have the freedom to move funds with high frequency and at a low cost.
Skrmiish chief executive Luke Grob emphasises that the new partnerships are going to accelerate the team’s ability to implement the Skrmiish economic value system and build a play-to-earn format for the majority of the world’s gamers.
The ultimate goal is to grow Skrmiish into the go-to competitive app with digital banking for gamers globally. “Skrmiish will enable every gamer in the world to earn in every match they play within the games they already love,” says Grob.
“This is a revolution in the accessibility to earn while playing games and democratises the competitive esports and blockchain based gaming industries. We’re fired up to launch our new MoneyMatch feature across multiple game titles, taking the casual gamer experience to a new level of excitement that we hope will delight players around the world.”
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