Knock Knock Raises $2 Million Seed Round, Led by Raine Ventures, to Redefine Chat Gaming

By PRNewswire On Jul 28, 2018

London Venture Partners, Ludlow Ventures, and Gregory Milken Also Participating in the Seed Round

Knock Knock, a developer of chat-native games and technologies, announced that it raised a $2 million funding round led by Raine Ventures with participation from games specialists London Venture Partners, Ludlow Ventures, and Gregory Milken. Knock Knock will use the funding to build the world’s largest chat gaming network by by combining chat-native play experiences with unique and engaging IP.

“With a saturated mobile games space and VR, AR, and crypto-gaming years away from mass consumer adoption, we believe chat games represent the biggest growth opportunity for the gaming market,” said Andrew Friday, CEO of Knock Knock. “Genre-winning games are always built from the ground up for their native platforms, but not many ambitious games exist on chat yet. We want to leverage the unique characteristics of chat platforms to give players more engaging experiences with deeper metasystems.”

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Knock Knock’s strategic approach to building deeper chat-native games has three main components:

Fully leveraging the social nature of chat platforms- Chat games can connect players in a myriad of ways that other platforms can’t, but the experiences today don’t reflect that. Knock Knock will fully leverage chat’s inherently social nature by implementing new group dynamics into proven game concepts.
Utilizing chat’s frictionless onboarding-Chat games have no install and only take seconds to load, this requires a total rethinking of the first-time user experience.
Unlocking the true consumer potential of bots-Bots today are largely used as glorified push notifications. Knock Knock is designing key parts of gameplay around bots, such as sending heroes on quests via a bot message interaction without even opening the game.

“Knock Knock’s unique model engages players in new ways across multiple platforms and has the potential to usher in the next wave of chat games that will redefine the market,” said Courtney Favreau, a venture capital partner at Raine Ventures. “The founding team has an impressive track record in the mobile and chat gaming spaces and we’re very excited to help them bring their vision to life.”

Knock Knock was founded by Andrew Friday, who was formerly a senior product manager for the Chat Games team at Zynga and Andrew N. Green, who was formerly the head of business operations at TinyCo (acquired by Jam City in 2016).

According to market research firm Statista, there are currently 5.8 billion monthly active users worldwide using chat apps, of which gamers are a large and growing segment.