Universal appeal helped this Korean game developer win fans in China – and $6.5M in funding

Innospark co-founder and CEO Jae Chan Shin.

Korean mobile games developer Innospark announced last Wednesday that it raised US$6.5 million in series B funding from Keytone Ventures, SL Investment, and Company K Partners. Tech in Asia got in touch with the startup’s co-founder and CEO, Jae Chan Shin, to learn more about what the funding means for Innospark’s future.

The Seoul-based indie dev is best known for Hero Sky: Epic Guild Wars and Dragon Friends: Green Witch. Hero Sky is a free-to-play, Clash of Clans-esque base defense game with a twist. In addition to the standard minions used to attack and defend, players can call upon a variety of “heroes” to supplement their battles. It launched on iOS and Android in March.

Dragon Friends has also been compared to another Supercell smash hit, Hay Day, but with the added element of dragon breeding. It was released for iOS and Android in June 2014 and debuted on Amazon’s Kindle Fire in April.

Both titles have seen strong organic growth globally, with penetration in tough-to-crack China particularly noteworthy. While Shin wouldn’t divulge exact download figures for China, he describes the country as a “key market.”

“For Hero Sky, daily active users have hit 200,000 and our top territories include about 35 percent of our player base in Europe and the USA, 35 percent in Asia, and the rest evenly distributed worldwide,” he tells Tech in Asia. Google Play indicates that both of Innospark’s current hits have been installed somewhere between 1 million and 5 million times each.

The inclusion of Keytone Ventures in Innospark’s latest round may also serve as an indication of the startup’s success in China. Keytone – based in Beijing – focuses solely on the Chinese market, with its founding team comprised of a former managing partner at KPCB China and former partners at IDG-Accel.

Hero Sky.

The secret to Innospark’s success in China is also the reason its games have been popular elsewhere: universal appeal.

“We’ve purposely designed our games to appeal to global audiences by making sure there’s enough breadth of content to appeal to different audiences in different parts of the world,” Shin says. “For instance, in Hero Sky, we have more than 100 playable characters whose designs were inspired by mythology from all over the world, including heroes like the ‘monkey emperor’ – who was, of course, inspired by Chinese mythology.”

Shin adds that the funding will be used for hiring and marketing, with a focus on China.

Innospark closed a KRW 2 billion (US$1.8 million) series A round in March 2013, which was led by domestic VC Premier Partners.

The startup was founded in 2012 by members of the team that created 2011 hit Rule the Sky, the highest-grossing game in the Korean App Store for more than a year after launch. The game generated over US$50 million in revenue.