Singapore’s Inzen Studio raises $717,288 in series A round

Singapore-based Inzen Studio, a two-year-old mobile game developer, has raised S$935,000 (US$717,288) in a series A round from investors in Singapore, China, and Japan. This is the largest funding round a game studio in Singapore has received to date (as far as we know). The record was previously held by Daylight Studios, which raised a round led by Red Dot Ventures. The largest funding rounds by Singapore-based studios to date have been US$2.9M by King studio Nonstop Games and US$1.48M by Booster Pack Studio.

Inzen Studio announced a S$550,000 round last December from angel investors Hans de Back and Harveen Narulla.

Its latest funding round was led by Incubate Fund, followed by the Global Mobile Game Confederation (GMGC) and Singapore-based angel investor Melvin Tan. Inzen Studio is Incubate Fund’s first SEA game studio investment, and GMGC’s first game studio investment.

The Inzen team has expanded from five founders to a total of 13 team members based in Singapore and Uruguay. The startup’s founding team is from the now-defunct Singapore-MIT Gambit Game Lab, the other half of whom went on to form the SUTD Game Lab following the studio’s closure.

See: Singapore’s first PS4 game, One Upon Light, launches today

Inzen Studio has also announced that two of its games will be making their way to China. Co-founder and CEO Gerald Tock says that “a tactical free-form formation shmup, an online multi-touch projectile rebounding PvP game, and a couple more” are in the works. Given the studio’s present portfolio, it’s easy to guess that its mobile arcade games Dark Dot and Nightmare Duel will be the ones first heading into China.

Inzen’s debut game as a new studio back at Casual Connect Asia 2013 was the arcade game Amazing Studly Strikes.

Tock says that the team has chosen China as a starting point as it felt “a strong connection with both players and potential partners” when it first visited in March this year. “We’ve since built on that by immersing ourselves in the culture and studying player tastes over our many trips there,” he adds. Tock says that Inzen’s plan is to make games with the world in mind, and that it is only starting with the Chinese market.

Some of Inzen Studio’s team will be stationed in Beijing from the next week onward, with more announcements to come in early 2015. There are more details on its team in this blog post, or you can check out its cute comic, inspired by the funding round, here: