Startups

Homa raises another $100 million for its data-driven mobile gaming tools

Comment

Digitally generated image of marbles rolling down chutes
Image Credits: Boris SV / Getty Images

French startup Homa has raised a $100 million Series B funding round. Quadrille Capital and Headline are leading the round. Homa partners with indie mobile game studios so their games are perfectly optimized to become a hit game on the App Store and Google Play.

In other words, Homa builds tools that help third-party developers build games. The reason for that is that it has become incredibly challenging to stand out when you build a hypercasual, casual or board game with a small dev team.

Other investors in the Series B include Northzone, Fabric Ventures, Bpifrance, Eurazeo and Singular. With Voodoo, Homa is one of the companies that have turned mobile gaming development into a methodical, data-driven process.

Homa’s software development kit (SDK) helps you track various metrics thanks to built-in analytics features. It can be important if you want to improve session times and retention after one day, seven days or 28 days. Homa also fosters A/B testing at scale to optimize user engagement.

After that, Homa helps you monetize with ads. The SDK gives you tools to track monetization metrics, such as the cost per install compared to the eCPM. This way, Homa can run predictable ad campaigns that will grow a game’s user base and eventually generate more revenue.

The company’s metrics are mind boggling. Since 2018, Homa has published 80 games and attracted one billion downloads. Overall, the company has raised $165 million and now works with 160 people.

Up next, Homa wants to explore web3 and the world of NFTs. It has started collaborating with Sorare and it has ambitious plans for its collection of games going forward.

The startup wants to build a universe of interconnected games with virtual worlds and characters owned by creators and players — a sort of Homa metaverse. Even if that plan doesn’t pan out, it seems that Homa is on the right track with its game publishing tools — and it now has more money to invest to improve its tech stack.

More TechCrunch

India’s Adani Group is plotting a move into e-commerce and digital payments, according to a Financial Times report, as the conglomerate seeks to diversify its portfolio and compete with Mukesh…

Adani to battle Reliance, Walmart in India’s e-commerce, payments race, report says

Ledger, a French startup mostly known for its secure crypto hardware wallets, has started shipping new wallets nearly 18 months after announcing the latest Ledger Stax devices. The updated wallet…

Ledger starts shipping its high-end hardware crypto wallet

A data protection taskforce that’s spent over a year considering how the European Union’s data protection rulebook applies to OpenAI’s viral chatbot, ChatGPT, reported preliminary conclusions Friday. The top-line takeaway…

EU’s ChatGPT taskforce offers first look at detangling the AI chatbot’s privacy compliance

Here’s a shoutout to LatAm early-stage startup founders! We want YOU to apply for the Startup Battlefield 200 at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024. But you’d better hurry — time is running…

LatAm startups: Apply to Startup Battlefield 200

The countdown to early-bird savings for TechCrunch Disrupt, taking place October 28–30 in San Francisco, continues. You have just five days left to save up to $800 on the price…

5 days left to get your early-bird Disrupt passes

Venture investment into Spanish startups also held up quite well, with €2.2 billion raised across some 850 funding rounds.

Spanish startups reached €100 billion in aggregate value last year

Featured Article

Onyx Motorbikes was in trouble — and then its 37-year-old owner died

James Khatiblou, the owner and CEO of Onyx Motorbikes, was watching his e-bike startup fall apart.  Onyx was being evicted from its warehouse in El Segundo, Los Angeles. The company’s unpaid bills were stacking up. His chief operating officer had abruptly resigned. A shipment of around 100 CTY2 dirt bikes from Chinese supplier Suzhou Jindao…

15 hours ago
Onyx Motorbikes was in trouble — and then its 37-year-old owner died

Featured Article

Iyo thinks its gen AI earbuds can succeed where Humane and Rabbit stumbled

Iyo represents a third form factor in the push to deliver standalone generative AI devices: Bluetooth earbuds.

15 hours ago
Iyo thinks its gen AI earbuds can succeed where Humane and Rabbit stumbled

Arati Prabhakar, profiled as part of TechCrunch’s Women in AI series, is director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Women in AI: Arati Prabhakar thinks it’s crucial to get AI ‘right’

AniML, the French startup behind a new 3D capture app called Doly, wants to create the PhotoRoom of product videos, sort of. If you’re selling sneakers on an online marketplace…

Doly lets you generate 3D product videos from your iPhone

Elon Musk’s AI startup, xAI, has raised $6 billion in a new funding round, it said today, as Musk shores up capital to aggressively compete with rivals including OpenAI, Microsoft,…

Elon Musk’s xAI raises $6B from Valor, a16z, and Sequoia

Indian startup Zypp Electric plans to use fresh investment from Japanese oil and energy conglomerate ENEOS to take its EV rental service into Southeast Asia early next year, TechCrunch has…

Indian EV startup Zypp Electric secures backing to fund expansion to Southeast Asia

Last month, one of the Bay Area’s better-known early-stage venture capital firms, Uncork Capital, marked its 20th anniversary with a party in a renovated church in San Francisco’s SoMa neighborhood,…

A venture capital firm looks back on changing norms, from board seats to backing rival startups

The families of victims of the shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas are suing Activision and Meta, as well as gun manufacturer Daniel Defense. The families bringing the…

Families of Uvalde shooting victims sue Activision and Meta

Like most Silicon Valley VCs, what Garry Tan sees is opportunities for new, huge, lucrative businesses.

Y Combinator’s Garry Tan supports some AI regulation but warns against AI monopolies

Everything in society can feel geared toward optimization – whether that’s standardized testing or artificial intelligence algorithms. We’re taught to know what outcome you want to achieve, and find the…

How Maven’s AI-run ‘serendipity network’ can make social media interesting again

Miriam Vogel, profiled as part of TechCrunch’s Women in AI series, is the CEO of the nonprofit responsible AI advocacy organization EqualAI.

Women in AI: Miriam Vogel stresses the need for responsible AI

Google has been taking heat for some of the inaccurate, funny, and downright weird answers that it’s been providing via AI Overviews in search. AI Overviews are the AI-generated search…

What are Google’s AI Overviews good for?

When it comes to the world of venture-backed startups, some issues are universal, and some are very dependent on where the startups and its backers are located. It’s something we…

The ups and downs of investing in Europe, with VCs Saul Klein and Raluca Ragab

Welcome back to TechCrunch’s Week in Review — TechCrunch’s newsletter recapping the week’s biggest news. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here. OpenAI announced this week that…

Scarlett Johansson brought receipts to the OpenAI controversy

Accurate weather forecasts are critical to industries like agriculture, and they’re also important to help prevent and mitigate harm from inclement weather events or natural disasters. But getting forecasts right…

Deal Dive: Can blockchain make weather forecasts better? WeatherXM thinks so

pcTattletale’s website was briefly defaced and contained links containing files from the spyware maker’s servers, before going offline.

Spyware app pcTattletale was hacked and its website defaced

Featured Article

Synapse, backed by a16z, has collapsed, and 10 million consumers could be hurt

Synapse’s bankruptcy shows just how treacherous things are for the often-interdependent fintech world when one key player hits trouble. 

3 days ago
Synapse, backed by a16z, has collapsed, and 10 million consumers could be hurt

Sarah Myers West, profiled as part of TechCrunch’s Women in AI series, is managing director at the AI Now institute.

Women in AI: Sarah Myers West says we should ask, ‘Why build AI at all?’

Keeping up with an industry as fast-moving as AI is a tall order. So until an AI can do it for you, here’s a handy roundup of recent stories in the world…

This Week in AI: OpenAI and publishers are partners of convenience

Evan, a high school sophomore from Houston, was stuck on a calculus problem. He pulled up Answer AI on his iPhone, snapped a photo of the problem from his Advanced…

AI tutors are quietly changing how kids in the US study, and the leading apps are from China

Welcome to Startups Weekly — Haje‘s weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. Well,…

Startups Weekly: Drama at Techstars. Drama in AI. Drama everywhere.

Last year’s investor dreams of a strong 2024 IPO pipeline have faded, if not fully disappeared, as we approach the halfway point of the year. 2024 delivered four venture-backed tech…

From Plaid to Figma, here are the startups that are likely — or definitely — not having IPOs this year

Federal safety regulators have discovered nine more incidents that raise questions about the safety of Waymo’s self-driving vehicles operating in Phoenix and San Francisco.  The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration…

Feds add nine more incidents to Waymo robotaxi investigation

Terra One’s pitch deck has a few wins, but also a few misses. Here’s how to fix that.

Pitch Deck Teardown: Terra One’s $7.5M Seed deck