News

Tech start-up Megacool raises $1.5 million to make viral GIFs for mobile games

Funds to be used to employ new staff and accelerate development of API

Date Type Companies involved Size
July 27th, 2017 investment Megacool $1.5m
Tech start-up Megacool raises $1.5 million to make viral GIFs for mobile games

Mobile games start-up Megacool has raised $1.5 million in seed funding to develop GIF sharing API for mobile games developers.

The API lets developers set parameters to determine when GIFs are recorded and then lets players share them with others.

Megacool plans use the funds to accelerate product and business development as it expands its API, as well as bring new developers on board for the beta.

It also aims to expand the number of staff it employs, in particular its engineering and development team in Oslo, Norway.

The investment round was led by Alliance Venture and also included Norselab and Olympic medalist winner Aksel Lund Svindal.

Viral user acquisition

“Traditional user acquisition is incredibly expensive as pricing has been driven up by the largest and richest publishers on the App Store, making it difficult for the majority of mobile devs to gain traction,” said Megacool CEO Nicolaj Broby Petersen, who will be speaking at Pocket Gamer Connects Helsinki 2017 on September 19th to 20th.

“Traditional ads are also obnoxious and intrusive, breaking gameplay and pulling the player out of the game. We want to replicate word-of-mouth in mobile games by giving players a quick and easy way to record GIF moments within their games and seamlessly share them via text messaging and other social channels.”

Megacool was founded in June 2015 by the founding members of Norwegian mobile studio Dirtybit, which published titles such as the Fun Run series.

Developers can find out more about Megacool’s tech here.


Head of Content

Craig Chapple is a freelance analyst, consultant and writer with specialist knowledge of the games industry. He has previously served as Senior Editor at PocketGamer.biz, as well as holding roles at Sensor Tower, Nintendo and Develop.