Young Singaporean company bags $5m series A, clinches deal with Unity

République is a popular independent video game created with Unity. Image credit: Camouflaj.

Singapore-based Cloud Alliance, a company that develops software systems for game developers, has raised a US$5 million series A, it announced yesterday. The funding comes from Singaporean private investment firm Aetius Capital.

In a bit of an atypical fashion for a startup, the founder and CEO of Aetius Capital Benjamin Cher is also a co-founder of Cloud Alliance, which was only established in March.

While two months seem a little early in a company’s life cycle for it to raise a series A (there’s barely a website up), Aetius claims it was just that good a deal because of the opportunity therein.

CloudMoolah will serve over 5.5 million game developers registered on Unity’s platform all over the world.

“The company was co-founded because it had a compelling business proposition,” Benjamin tells Tech in Asia. “Aetius evaluated the deal based on its investment merits and decided to lead the series A.”

Cloud Alliance has scored a global deal with US-based Unity Technologies, creator of a robust game development engine that a lot of independent game makers swear by. The engine has been used to create games for traditional (PC & console), mobile, and virtual reality formats.

The young company will use the funding to develop a product called CloudMoolah, which Unity will use as a payment system, and integrate it with payment providers regionally. It will also use part of the money to market and promote the platform to Unity developers worldwide.

CloudMoolah will be used to collect revenues from end users, especially in regions like Southeast Asia where payment methods like credit cards are not as widespread. That’s why it will be integrated into payment gateways in this region first.

Cloud Alliance was formed by a team with experience in the gaming and payments spaces and presented a convincing value proposition, which was what convinced Unity to get on board.

Benjamin adds that the team had a detailed business plan in terms of hiring requirements, research and development, and so on, for which the US$5 million investment “should be more than sufficient for now.”

The company says the product will serve over 5.5 million game developers registered on Unity’s platform all over the world.