Cyprus-based business intelligence platform raises €1 million in funding

Magify, a Cyprus-based business intelligence and LiveOps platform for game developers, has raised €1 million in funding from Steam Power Investments, founded by former executives of Melsoft.

According to an official announcement, the new funding will support further product development, enhance AI features, and help Magify expand into new markets. This follows an earlier investment from Narwhal Accelerator in June.

The announcement explained that “Cyprus is a growing hotbed for the mobile gaming industry, with a vibrant development scene including around 268 gaming companies as of August 2024, as well as leading game makers”.

According to AppMagic, the total revenue of all Cyprus-based mobile publishers combined exceeded $980 million in 2023.

Additionally, Cyprus’ gaming industry is a key component of the country’s ICT sector, which generated €2.33 billion in gross value added in 2022.

The announcement mentioned that “Magify tackles the challenges of the ongoing global game development industry crisis by empowering small and mid-sized studios to boost their business efficiency”.

“It provides the precise, data-driven insights they need for smarter decision-making, leveraging AI prediction algorithms,” it added.

Moreover, while Magnify is based in Cyprus, its target markets include Europe and the United States.

In terms of addressing the challenges in the game development sector, the company noted that the industry has recently seen a growing trend of standalone analytics platforms entering the market.

This, it continued, “is driven by the need to improve game studios’ business efficiency (user acquisition, retention and monetisation), as well as the growing demand for precise data-driven decision-making”.

“Game studios recognise the immense value of leveraging advanced analytics to optimise game performance and player engagement,” it added.

It pointed out that “these platforms provide comprehensive insights and relieve studios from the burden of spending significant resources on integrating siloed data from various sources or building costly in-house systems”.

“Despite this, these platforms often cover just a few different aspects of game management, such as Live Operations (LiveOps), marketing, and monetisation,” the company stated.

Magify said that it solves this problem by “providing a pay-as-you-go, end-to-end platform that combines business intelligence and LiveOps tools”.

Furthermore, according to the announcement, Magify’s platform enables game studios to make data-driven decisions, optimise resources, and reduce costs by 10 to 30 times compared to building in-house systems.

It further mentioned that it streamlines the analysis of game performance and marketing effectiveness, offering integrated tools for financial planning, user segmentation, and product development.

This, the company said, leads to reduced costs, faster time-to-market, improved revenue per user, and lower user acquisition costs.

The announcement noted that studios are already utilising the platform to track marketing campaigns, run in-game tests, and manage monetisation remotely.

Magify was founded by Evgeniy Kurenkov, who previously built game studio Epic Star Games and mobile app company Rocket Science.

The platform is being developed by Magify’s international team of over 30 employees, mainly developers, data engineers, and configuration managers.

“We want studios of all sizes to have equal opportunities to compete because, ultimately, we want more great games to thrive and succeed,” said Evgeniy Kurenkov, Founder and CEO of Magify.

“This investment will accelerate our expansion into global markets, allowing us to support a broader spectrum of game studios, from indie developers to industry giants,” he added.

“We’re not just building a tool; we’re creating the backbone of the next generation of gaming,” Kurenkov explained.

The announcement stressed that “this vision gained the support of Steam Power Investments co-founders Andrei Yarantsau and Alexander Shilyaev”.

Both are gaming industry veterans, previously holding the roles of CEO and COO, respectively, at casual games studio Melsoft, which was acquired by Moon Active in 2020 during their tenure.

“Achieving success in gaming is hard, but maintaining it is even harder,” said Steam Power Investments co-founder Andrei Yarantsau.

He also said that “the key to success lies in making informed decisions about your audience’s behaviour”.

“Over the decade of developing our own games, we made many attempts to find ready-made game analytics, but we always ended up creating custom backend solutions,” he added.

He explained that in Magify, they “finally found an external tool that not only meets our requirements but far exceeds them“.

“We see great opportunities for cooperation between our current and future portfolio companies that develop games and Magify, which will help them reduce costs and maximise efficiency,” Yarantsau concluded.