Boost Capital Partners has told us it has $30m to spend on startups in mobile gaming and beyond.
The new London-based VC firm was founded by seasoned investor and former Initial Capital partner Alvaro Alvarez del Rio, who counts Supercell, Hutch and Deliveroo as some of his previous seed stage investments.
Partner Ignacio Monereo spent seven years at Google in partnerships and business development before moving to Meta as head of gaming creators for EMEA and APAC. He has also previously invested in Super Scale, Magmatic Games, Thndr Games and MetaBit Games.
Blackburn Capital cofounder Benjamin Torrero is also an investor at the firm, and Boost partner Pablo Morenes is a former banker who has worked at Credit Suisse, Blackstone, Assetario and Activision Blizzard.
Boost is now looking for pre-seed and seed investments of up to $750k, plus potential follow-ons. It has already backed seven companies across Europe and Latin America, and sees value in gaming founders swapping knowledge with the firm’s non-gaming investments.
“When Alvaro was at Initial Capital working with games companies and started helping software companies, he realised the level of sophistication when it came to understanding a user was very different,” Boost partner Ignacio Monereo told us.
“He set out to bridge that gap by raising a fund to help outstanding entrepreneurs in other verticals to use best practices around acquisition, engagement, retention and monetisation of their user base.”
Fellow Boost partner Pablo Morenes told us: “We felt that a lot of the expertise that the games industry has developed over the past decade has not trickled fast enough to other areas of the startup world.”
“We see that opportunity as a two-way street, however,” continued Morenes. “We think games startups will also benefit from innovation by non-games startup ecosystems in areas like go-to-market, tech tools or product dev strategies. That is why we are keen to have a mix of games and non-games portfolio companies interacting and collaborating with each other.”
Boost chose to invest in new Helsinki studio Cosmic Lounge because of its experienced team and its “data-based engine to select projects and iterate very fast,” Monereo told us, who adds that potential future partners would also ideally be “community builders” who are “willing to exchange learnings with companies in other sectors.”
“We are very much interested in understanding whether the company plans to combine game mechanics, create new genres, adopt a new technology or simply approach user acquisition in a different way,” added Monereo.
