Playgama, a game tech platform with a presence in Cyprus, announced on Tuesday that it raised $3 million in a funding round led by The Open Platform and s16vc.

The funding roud received additional support from The Games Fund (TGF), FJ Labs, TON Ventures, and Kirill Eves, the CEO and Founder of Unlimit.

The Games Fund is an early-stage VC fund based in New York and Cyprus. It was founded by video game industry veterans and invests in future leaders, including innovative early-stage game developers, gaming technologies, and services.

According to the recent Drake Star Global Gaming Report, TGF is the most active seed focused gaming VC fund. It also holds the largest gaming portfolio in Eastern Europe and Cyprus.

“Cyprus is a growing hotbed for the mobile gaming industry, with a vibrant development scene including around 274 gaming companies as of November 2024, as well as leading game makers,” the company said in an official announcement.

It added that Cyprus’ gaming industry is a key player in the country’s ICT sector, which generated €3.09 billion or 11.2 per cent of the total Gross Value Added in 2023, according to CySTAT.

“In Playgama, we saw an opportunity to fund a business with an innovative model and tremendous market potential,” said Ilia Eremeev from The Games Fund.

“Alternative platforms are a silently but rapidly growing market, and technological progress has made the distribution and operation of complex HTML5 games possible,” he explained.

“Playgama’s founding team,” Eremeev continued, “is not just extremely passionate and dedicated but also capable and proven in turning market hyper-fragmentation into business opportunities”.

“We are honoured that they chose The Games Fund as their partners,” Eremeev added.

Playgama operates on the The HTML5 gaming market that is undergoing a renaissance.

Valued at $23 billion in 2021, it is projected to grow to $32 billion by 2030, driven by in-game purchases and advertising.

Despite its expansion, the HTML5 market remains highly fragmented.

Unlike unified platforms such as the App Store and Google Play for mobile, or Steam and the Epic Games Store for PC, it consists of thousands of independent playgrounds, along with non-gaming websites, media outlets, social networks, and messaging apps—spanning both global and region-specific audiences.

“Even leaders capture only small fractions of the global web gaming audience, and there’s currently no way for developers to access the entire market at once,” the company said, noting that it aims to change this.

The company pointed out that its vision is to streamline distribution through a “master key” approach.

This allows it provide developers with a simple and efficient route to tap into all available platforms, languages, and markets, maximising their chances of reaching a large and diverse audience.

To accomplish this, Playgama said that it is developing a comprehensive Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) ecosystem.

This includes a unified software development kit (SDK) that allows for seamless publishing across multiple platforms through a single integration.

Developers gain access to numerous playgrounds, distributors, and other platforms, with additional integrations continually being added.

Moreover, a QA tool simplifies the approval process by consolidating the requirements of all platforms into a single checklist, supported by around-the-clock assistance during approval and moderation stages.

Additionally, the platform provides tools for monetisation, marketing, content management, and payments, ensuring developers have everything they need to succeed.

“The open-source “integrate once, reach everywhere” SDK, Playgama Bridge, is at the center of this ecosystem and has already been used by over a thousand developers,” the company said.

“Freely available for possible modification and redistribution, Playgama Bridge simplifies game integration across numerous platforms simultaneously with dozens of plugins covered, and a rapidly expanding list of supported game engines including Unity, JavaScript, Godot, Construct 3, and GameMaker,” it added.

This approach, the company explained, “provides developers with all the tools they need to navigate the fragmented web market, enhancing their reach and ROI while freeing them from the hassle of tackling distribution challenges and allowing them to focus on game creation and development”.

Playgama founder Dmitry Kachmar

The announcement also mentioned that Playgama’s founder Dmitry Kachmar started the company in 2023, during a sabbatical he took to complete his studies at Harvard Business School.

To build Playgama, Kachmar assembled an international team of professionals with backgrounds at companies like Miro, Playrix, Easybrain, and Vivid Money.

The team is made up of over 30 employees, spanning locations from the US to Indonesia, with the headquarters in Dubai. Part of the team is located in Cyprus as well.

“We want to transform the web gaming market and empower HTML5 game creators to effortlessly reach audiences they once could only dream of,” said Kachmar.

“Currently, Playgama’s distribution network has the potential to reach over 200 million monthly active players— and this is just the beginning,” he added.

“With this funding, we’ll accelerate further improvement of Playgama’s platform for developers, expand our toolkit, and introduce advanced analytics and fintech solutions,” Kachmar concluded.