Former PopCap staff have joined together to create a new free-to-play mobile game studio under the name Electric Manta.

As reported by VentureBeat, the new games studio was founded by former PopCap senior director of business development Mark Cochrane, who now operates as its CEO. The name Electric Manta was chosen as the company wanted it to represent itself as being "full of rare and amazing people" that want to create something awesome.

Based in London, the new team is composed of three former PopCap employees: Elizabeth Sampat, Alexis De Girolami and Liam Robinson.

Additional members include industry veterans from the likes of Zynga, Kwalee and Miniclip with work across multiple hit mobile games such as Plants vs. Zombies 2, Subway Surfers, Jetpack Jump and Bejeweled Stars.

"Stealth mode"

"I was lucky enough to get an opportunity to set up Electric Manta," said Electric Manta founder and CEO Mark Cochrane.

"I was lucky enough to snag Elizabeth and some other PopCap alumni to join the team. We wanted to come out of stealth mode and announced the studio."

"We’ll announce that in the coming weeks with some interesting partnerships. A lot of people have been exposed to hypercasual over three to five years and they are probably wanting something more as they evolve as players toward the casual spectrum.”

Although not much information has been shared about the studio's upcoming projects, Electric Mantas is working in the mobile space on hypercasual, player versus player and narrative-driven story games. The first games and partnerships the company are involved in will be revealed in the forthcoming weeks.

Last year, PopCap pulled the highly anticipated Plants vs. Zombies 3 from soft launch after several months of testing the new entry to the series.