Former Zynga and TinyCo devs have raised $2 million in funding for new chat app games developer Knock Knock.

The studio is led by former Zynga senior product manager Andrew Friday and ex-TinyCo head of business operations Andrew Green.

The money raised for the new studio will go toward building a chat app gaming network that spans across various existing messenger apps.

Knock Knock outlined its approach to building the network as having three elements.

The first revolves around leveraging chat’s inherently social nature by implementing new group dynamics into popular game concepts, while the second is utilising the medium's lack of need for downloads, as they often adopt HTML5 technology.

The third component is designing parts of gameplay around bots, such as sending heroes on quests via a bot message interaction without even opening the game.

Knock Knock aims to launch its first title on Facebook Instant Games later this year, with a release coming to WeChat in early 2019.

Opportunity knocks

The funding round was led by Raine Ventures with participation from games specialists London Venture Partners, Ludlow Ventures, and Gregory Milken.

“With a saturated mobile games space and VR, AR, and crypto-gaming years away from mass consumer adoption, we believe chat games represent the biggest growth opportunity for the gaming market,” said Knock Knock CEO Andrew Friday.

“Genre-winning games are always built from the ground up for their native platforms, but not many ambitious games exist on chat yet.

“We want to leverage the unique characteristics of chat platforms to give players more engaging experiences with deeper metasystems.”