‘Instant play’ specialist Minit Games has raised $2m in pre-seed funding.
LVP and Sony Innovation Fund led the pre-seed round. Angels including Stefan Klemm (Goodgame, Bigpoint), Timo Soininen (Small Giant) and Klaas Kerstig (Gameforge, Flaregames, Phoenix) also backed the Hamburg-based outfit.
Minit Games says it is building a “personalized, algorithmically driven feed of bite-sized HTML5 games that load instantly”. Game-makers will be able to publish their games directly to Minit Games’ TikTok-style feed. An invite-only alpha launch is coming soon, says Minit.
The Hamburg-based team is led by cofounders Ole Schaper and Mark Buchholz, both former execs at Sviper, The Sandbox and Kyna Games. Buchholz was founder of Sviper, head of studio and game director at The Sandbox and cofounder of Kyna Games. Schaper was CEO at Sviper, mobile director and head of studio at The Sandbox and cofounder at Kyna Games.
“Players live in algorithmic feeds, but games are still trapped in stores,” said Minit Games cofounder Ole Schaper. “We’re building a destination where short- form games are as easy to discover and engage with as any other modern media format. We aren’t just showing clips; we are delivering the full, interactive experience immediately.”
Minit is not the first mobile game outfit to try and make a ‘TikTok for games’. Supercell-backed HypeHype has been in soft launch for several years, and Smirk emerged as a contender in this space in late 2024, but also does not appear to have made it out of soft launch yet. One of the first companies to try this approach, Playbyte, has closed.
TikTok itself briefly flirted with playable, in-feed games in 2023, but not long afterwards the company told us that it was a test that has since been halted.
