Mobile game startup Haegin joins ‘unicorn’ club with $82 million investment

Haegin, a Korean mobile game company, has attracted 100 billion won ($82 million) in Series B investment. The Korean startup has now joined the ranks of ‘unicorn companies,’ valued at close to 1 trillion won ($8 billion) among unlisted startups in business for less than ten years.

Existing investors such as Bon Angels Venture Partners and Storm Ventures participated in this investment round. In addition to Kakao Games and Neptune, which made new investments worth 40 billion won ($33 million), Alois Ventures, KDB Industrial Bank, Kona Venture Partners, Netmarble, NetEase, Lotte, and foreign investors such as Ventures and VNG also joined.

Haegin oversaw the development of global hit games including ‘Summoners War: Arena in the Sky,’ ‘Golf Star,’ ‘God of Fishing,’ ‘Home Run Battle,’ and ‘Com2uS Professional Baseball’ and became the first domestic mobile game company to be listed on the KOSDAQ.

‘Play Together’ draws global attention in the Metaverse market

The Korean mobile game company was founded in September 2017 by Lee Young-il, the successful co-founder of Com2uS. It has been consistently recognized for its development capabilities in the market. At the beginning of its establishment, it attracted more than 8 billion won in investment from Storm Ventures, Tencent, Bon Angels, Netmarble-Kona Fund, Devsisters, etc. Based on this, Haegin introduced various games with casual gameplay such as ‘Home Run Clash,’ ‘Overdogs,’ ‘Extreme Golf,’ and ‘Play Together’ to the global market. The main lineups account for more than 90% of total users and sales indices worldwide.

In particular, ‘Play Together’, released in April last year, is a casual metaverse game that supports mini-games, daily life experiences, character and house customization, etc., in a play environment with a high degree of freedom. Within a year of its release, it achieved 80 million global downloads and 4 million daily users (DAU). Furthermore, ‘Play Together’ draws attention in the global metaverse market by signing strategic MOUs with IPX (formerly Line Friends), Genie Music, Daehong Planning.

Startup to develop more games this year

Haegin is developing two new mobile games, including sports and RPG, to release this year. “The amount secured by this investment will be used for a large-scale expansion of recruitment of excellent talent, improvement of the working environment and welfare system, and expansion of investment in the game business to become a global game company. We plan to utilize it to strengthen the overall company’s capabilities actively,” a company statement said.

CEO Young-il Lee said, “With this investment as an opportunity, we will strengthen the services of our main line up such as ‘Home Run Clash,’ ‘Overdogs,’ ‘Extreme Golf’ and ‘Play Together’ and spur the development of two new games to become a global game company. We will do our best to leap forward.”

“We will do our best to lead the realization of a more enjoyable and exciting metaverse world, rather than being satisfied with being the No. 1 casual metaverse platform in the competitive metaverse platform market,” he added.

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