Konvoy, an early-stage investment firm that invests at the frontier of gaming, has announced a new $150 million fund as it continues on its mission to be “the best-performing investment firm within the $200 billion video gaming industry, while a recent report from Gamesone has the publicly-traded market cap at over $2 trillion.”
With the new fund, Konvoy will “have $270M under management.”
Konvoy Fund III will “focus on pre-seed, seed, and Series A gaming companies within a number of different gaming verticals – including technology, platforms, Web3 gaming – and gaming companies operating at the intersections with other industries, including education and healthcare.”
Geographically, Konvoy, which leads the majority of the investments it makes, “will continue to focus on North American, European and African markets, while actively expanding its investments into Latin America, India, South Korea, and South-East Asia.”
Denver-headquartered Konvoy’s portfolio consists of 33 companies which have “collectively raised $450M in follow-on funding.”
This reportedly “includes: Axie Infinity (combining the fun of gaming with the financial benefits of Play-to-Earn), Gamefam (a publisher and developer of games on the Roblox platform); Carry1st (Africa’s leading mobile games publisher with a payments solution); Ready Player Me (a cross-game avatar platform for the metaverse), Legends of Learning (an education-based gaming platform that 5% of kids in America use), and Sanlo (providing gaming and app creators with non-dilutive financing at scale), and Edgegap (reducing lag and improving player experience for gaming studios).”
Founded by Managing Partners Josh Chapman, Jason Chapman (brothers) and Jackson Vaughan, “all passionate gamers with a deep knowledge of the industry, Konvoy will now invest larger amounts in around 30 early-stage companies over a period of the next two and a half years.”
LPs backing the firm’s largest fund to-date “include family offices, gaming and media corporates, and gaming founders.”
Currently employing six investment team members, and a Head of Platform, Konvoy will “expand its team to 15-20 people by the end of 2023.”
In addition to financial investment, Konvoy “provides value to its portfolio companies by supporting on recruitment (sourcing, vetting, and strategy), product roadmap and engineering reviews, sharing unique insights and trends, establishing connections with strategic corporate partners, delivering support and guidance for follow-on funding (including investment decks, financial models, and data rooms), and exiting, as well as media and marketing support.”
The video game industry is now “generating about $200 billion revenue a year with a public market cap of over $2 trillion, according to Gamesone, while Newzoo, states that globally there are 3 billion gamers across mobile, console, and PC, with 1.2 billion of these watching other gamers play, according to Statista.”
Josh Chapman, Konvoy Managing Partner, comments:
“We look for the best entrepreneurs building the video game industry’s next category-defining companies, across the myriad of different gaming industry verticals, and this new $150M fund will supercharge our ability to do just that. We’re proactive and thesis-driven, meaning we have a vision of what we think the industry will look like, and then make investments based on that foresight. Our passion for this industry drives us toward our goal of being the best performing gaming investment firm in the world.”
Jason Chapman, Konvoy Managing Partner, adds:
“The pandemic was an adrenaline shot to the gaming industry because more and more people turned to games as a source of entertainment and also a way of staying social with their remote communities. We are bullish about the future of our sector and its ability to ride out the current macroeconomic turbulence that we see as being inevitable. While no industry can be recession-proof, we see gaming as being recession-resilient. We are thankful to all of our limited partners who have trusted us to be stewards of their capital and to the founders who have allowed us to join them on their journey.”
Jackson Vaughan, Konvoy Managing Partner, adds:
“We don’t just hypothesize what the future of gaming will look like, we actually get to play a leading role in shaping it. This new fund will not only allow us to focus on additional geographic regions, but also new types of companies and technologies. Our growth and industry impact since launching Fund I has been spectacular to be a part of, and if there’s one main learning from this period, in which the world has undergone unprecedented disruption, is that there is such an enormous opportunity ahead of us.”
