RO game design platform Machinations.io raises USD 3.3 million in Series A round

Machinations.io, a Romanian web platform to design and predict game economies, has raised USD 3.3 million in a Series A round.

The round was led by Hiro Capital, a European venture capital firm focused on the gaming industry, and follow-on investments by Acequia Capital, Venrex Investment Management and GapMinder.

The amount will be invested to grow its team and to launch new features and services to support the rapid development of the number of users.

Founded in 2018, Machinations.io is the first and only browser-based platform to design and predict game economies & systems for premium, free-to-play, and play-to-earn games.

The startup was launched by Mihai Gheza, Dana Gheza, Radu Crăciun, Alin Moldovan and Joris Dormans, a professor at Leiden University Center for the Arts in Society in the Netherlands. Machinations originated as a PhD research at the University of Amsterdam in 2012 by Joris Dormans (co-founder).

The startup has attracted so far about USD 5 million in investments. Before this Series A round, Machinations.io raised USD 1.6 million in funding from Seedcamp, GapMinder, Acequia Capital and several top angel investors.

The platform is currently used by more than 35,000 professionals in game design and 400 academic institutions worldwide.

"We're humbled to be backed by such reputed VCs and have their confidence in our vision and role within the games industry and beyond. We're growing our team and rolling out integrations with the most popular in-game telemetry providers and Web3 marketplaces, pushing towards our goal of becoming the standard for game economy modelling, forecasting and optimization," Mihai Gheza, co-founder & CEO at Machinations.io, said.

"The team at Machinations.io has forged a set of tools that will be foundational in the future of game design, both centralized games and Web3. The ability for any development studio to use a web platform that is simple, efficient, and specially created to make in-game economies in a streamlined browser-based solution is revolutionary," Spike Laurie, partner at Hiro Capital, said.

"We first invested in Machinations.io in 2020, in a round that we led. We continue to support the founders due to the uniqueness of the product they created. This product completely changes the way games are made and designed and implicitly how the largest entertainment industry develops," Cosmin Ochișor, GapMinder partner, said.