Israeli startup gets $5.5M funding to help game developers catch some whales

Soomla, a software development kit for in-app purchases, today announced it has raised US$5.5 million in series A funding from an undisclosed online gaming corporation. The Israel-based startup plans on using the cash to build GROW, a cross-game data sharing network. Mobile game developers can use the service, which is currently free to access, to spot and identify particularly high-paying users, or “whales.”

Soomla claims its platform is the only one of its kind in the world. Insights into premium users are generated by crowdsourced data across thousands of games in the GROW network. Once developers are able to identify users who have paid in other games, they can target them with push notifications and in-game campaigns. Soomla says these notifications are relevant and effective and do not come across as spam due to the trove of data it possesses. The startup also claims its network allows it to reach 400 million end users.

While the platform is dependent on companies in the network to share data, Soomla CEO Yaniv Nizan tells Tech in Asia there are plenty of incentives for developers to do so.

We encourage game publishers to share by giving them access to data. The basic deal is ‘share data to get data.’ We leveraged the existing open source community to break through the critical mass, and now we have hundreds of studios who have opted in to share. Game publishers can use the platform to understand how whales behave in other games. They can also use a special API in the SDK to query the transaction history of a user that started playing their game.

Soomla isn’t revealing the identity of its investor, but does say it is a “publicly traded, multi-billion dollar” enterprise. An emailed statement mentions that the investor has recently made two other acquisitions in the mobile space, and the investment in Soomla is meant to complement the portfolio. In an industry where premium users are worth up to 85 percent more than regular ones, this may well prove to be a smart acquisition.