Finnish Game Studio PlayRaven Raises $4.1M To Bring Strategy Games To Touchscreens

Norwegian VC Northzone seems to have a penchant for investing in mobile gaming companies right now. After leading Space Ape Games’ recent $7 million Series C round, the venture capital firm has invested in Finnish game studio PlayRaven — part of a newly announced $4.1 million fund raise by the Helsinki-based startup.

Described as an ‘extended seed round’, previous backers Creandum, London Venture Partners, and Jari Ovaskainen also participated, bringing total raised by PlayRaven since being founded in 2013 to $7.5 million.

Noteworthy is that Ovaskainen and London Venture Partners were both early investors in Supercell, a rather successful mobile and tablet games developer you may heard of that also hails from Finland.

PlayRaven’s first game (and only title thus far) is Spymaster, a free-to-play strategy game set in the Second World War. It was released world-wide on mobile devices in September 2014, reaching the top of Appleā€™s iPad strategy game charts in 99 countries. How that translates into actual downloads or monetisation, the company isn’t saying.

More broadly, PlayRaven’s remit is to develop “original and fresh strategy games for touch screens”, with an emphasis on what it calls a unique theme, visual style and gameplay for each title. The team is 16 person-strong, and spans founders who were previously at Remedy Entertainment, Wooga and Digital Chocolate. I also understand that the startup is currently working on two new strategy games, which is what today’s newly-disclosed funding will be used for.