French mobile game studio Happy Blue Fish started askblu.ai in 2017, backed by a first round of seed funding of € 300 thousand. This innovative SaaS solution (askblu.ai) has reached new milestones, and new Business Angels are backing its development with a second round of seed funding of € 200 thousand, managed by AGORA (also an investor).
A unique retention solution on the fast growing market of mobile games !
The mobile game market is growing fast, from almost nothing 10 years ago to an estimate of $ 100 billion in 2021 (i.e. 60% of the total video game market). But players are more and more hard to attract and to retain, with a high level of competition between games and steep player-acquisition costs.
askblu.ai will bring an efficient, plug & play, scalable SaaS platform to mobile game studios all over the world to help them increase monetization through increased player retention.
askblu.ai offers AI-based real-time player personalization to mobile games !
« Today acquiring new players is very costly. So, as a game studio, you want to retain each player as long as possible in your game » explains Dominique Busso, Happy Blue Fish Founder and CEO. « Thanks to AI – i.e. Machine Learning and Predictive Analysis – askblu.ai will personalize in real-time each player’s experience in a game. This will break the retention ceiling of mobile games, where players are very diverse. By increasing the player retention with askblu.ai, game studios will improve their monetization, with no upfront cost, no investment and a very easy setup. »
A worldwide market for askblu.ai !
Most game studios are located in Europe, North-america and Asia. askblu.ai will directly target this international market with a highly scalable serverless platform, based on AWS (Happy Blue Fish is a member of the AMAZON Activate program for startups).
Backed by its current and new investors, as well as by French agency BPI FRANCE, askblu.ai will first work with « pilot » game studios to improve the platform’s features and the AI algorithms, then open the platform for a « closed beta ».
Next funding of € 1.5 million in 2019 !
askblu.ai is a very ambitious project with a highly attractive value proposition. The startup is now raising € 1.5 million for 2019 : € 0.5 million early in 2019 to close the seed stage and € 1 million in Q3 2019 when askblu.ai starts monetizing.
Expected revenues of € 20 million in 2023 with very high scalability !
« We are currently a agile team of 5 talented and highly skilled people. Our goal is to reach € 20 million revenues in 2023, with a team of 80 people. Our market is deep and our business model and platform highly scalable. »
Medium-term growth drivers already identified !
« We intend to target all video games (mobile, PCs and consoles), educational apps and all apps with high retention needs », explains Dominique Busso.
Advisors : Fund raising (AGORA / Franck BOULLAND), Legal (CMM Avocats / Michel MARSEILLAN)
Investors : YOLE (Yohann LETUÉ), SDH (Stéphanie DERIAN), LA SYRAH (Michel CORRE), Vincent BRIENT, o2o STUDIO (Laurent PAQUETEAU), JFG Développement (Jean-François GAUTIER), Dominique BUSSO, AGORA (Franck BOULLAND)
Contacts : Franck BOULLAND (+33 6 63 27 44 16 – franck@agora-growandbehappy.fr), Dominique BUSSO (+33 6 80 21 76 18 – dbusso@happybluefish.fr)