Startups are already raising money for Telegram-based games

Startups are already raising money for Telegram-based games 🤔

Last week, I wrote about the phenomenal success of Hamster Kombat, which hit 110 million MAU and made Telegram one of the biggest platforms for play-to-earn games.

Today, while looking through the deals for an upcoming InvestGame report we are preparing, I came across several investments targeting Telegram-based games — something I hadn’t noticed until recently!

While some startups like PlaysOut and Animoca’s Gamee raised funds to publish multi-genre games for their Telegram mini-apps, others clearly took more inspiration from the recent success of Notcoin and Hamster Kombat.  🐹

For example, Anomaly raised $1.45M in May’24 for ‘play-to-airdrop’ games, while Akedo secured funding for its ‘tap-to-earn’ game Akedog — both heavily influenced by Notcoin and Hamster Kombat.

Some of the investors in these rounds are Yuga Labs, Kenetic Capital, 4399 Games, Mozaik Capital, and TON Ventures — all Web3-focused. 🔗

I expected to see terms like ‘tap-to-earn‘ and ‘play-to-airdrop‘ in investment announcements, but I’m surprised how soon this happened!

👉 On the one hand, I understand the urgency for investors to diversify and be early on the growing platform.

👉 But on the other hand, didn’t we learn anything from the Web3 investment hype of 2021-2022?

I’d love to hear your thoughts on these investments in the comments 💬