Luxembourg-based Machinations.io raises €3M led by Hiro Capital

Luxembourg-based Machinations.io, a browser-based platform to design, prototype and handoff game systems, announced on Wednesday that it has raised $3.3M (approximately €3M) in its Series A round of funding.

The round was led by London/Luxembourg-based technology venture capital fund Hiro Capital. The firm invests in the UK, the US, and European innovators in Games, IP, Metaverse Technology, Web 3.0, Esports, and Gamified Fitness. It generally invests at Seed through Series A and B stages.

Spike Laurie, Partner at Hiro Capital, says, “The team at Machinations.io has forged a set of tools that will be foundational in the future of game design, both centralised games and Web3. The ability for any development studio to use Machinations’ platform to create in-game economies in a streamlined browser-based solution is revolutionary. We’re excited to help the Machinations team take their vision to game creators across the globe.”

Predict and monitor game economies

Machinations has set out to change how game development studios design games by improving the process of game balancing. 

According to the company, game systems are very complex and dynamic. Representing them through static game design documents and sheets is ill-suited. It causes difficulty in communicating with them and makes it ‘impossible’ to simulate their outcome without custom scripting. 

This is where Machinations aims to make a difference.

The company claims that its browser-based platform, which is used by 35,000+ professionals, helps to design and predict game economies and systems. Built specifically to tackle the difficulties of designing game economies, the platform enables game designers to express game systems and perform large-scale simulations to get millions of gameplay progression data.

Machinations’ servers can simulate 100 gameplay sessions/second for a game with medium complexity. Additionally, teams can craft their diagrams collaboratively via live editing and with the help of all adjacent team management features. The design parameters can then be handed-off to the developers for implementation.

The company’s core team is comprised of Mihai Gheza (CEO), Alin Moldovan (CTO), Dana Gheza (CMO), Radu Craciun (COO), Vlad Centea (CAO) and Joris Dormans – the original creator of the framework and tool. Each of the members has senior experience of more than 10+ years in their field.

The company says it is rolling out integrations with popular telemetry providers and markets, and currently has more than 400 academic institutions that are using Machinations to train new generations of game designers.

The idea of turning Machinations into a commercial SaaS product materialised in April, 2018, when the team got accepted in the Fit4Start Accelerator (Luxembourg). After graduating the programme on October 4, 2018, the team was granted a total of €150K in funding.

Machinations is backed by some of the top VCs and angels in Europe. To date, it has closed a pre-Seed round in 2019 led by Seedcamp, and a Seed round of €580K led by GapMinder, in 2020.

Capital utilisation

The company says that the proceeds will help the company to invest in growing its workforce as well as in developing ‘powerful’ new features to further support its fast-growing user base in delivering and operating balanced games and economies.

Mihai Gheza, co-founder and CEO, says, “We’re humbled to be backed by such reputed VCs and excited to be working together towards our vision: a future where all systems, architects and data speak the same language and predict collectively.”