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London Venture Partners, Ludlow Ventures, and Gregory Milken also participating in the seed round.

Press release:
SAN FRANCISCO- July 24, 2018- Knock Knock, a developer of chat-native games and technologies, announced today that it raised a $2 million funding round led by Raine Ventures with participation from games specialists London Venture Partners, Ludlow Ventures, and Gregory Milken. Knock Knock will use the funding to build the world’s largest chat gaming network by by combining chat-native play experiences with unique and engaging IP.

“With a saturated mobile games space and VR, AR, and crypto-gaming years away from mass consumer adoption, we believe chat games represent the biggest growth opportunity for the gaming market,” said Andrew Friday, CEO of Knock Knock. “Genre-winning games are always built from the ground up for their native platforms, but not many ambitious games exist on chat yet. We want to leverage the unique characteristics of chat platforms to give players more engaging experiences with deeper metasystems.”

Knock Knock’s strategic approach to building deeper chat-native games has three main components: Fully leveraging the social nature of chat platforms- Chat games can connect players in a myriad of ways that other platforms can’t, but the experiences today don’t reflect that. Knock Knock will fully leverage chat’s inherently social nature by implementing new group dynamics into proven game concepts.

Utilizing chat’s frictionless onboarding- Chat games have no install and only take seconds to load, this requires a total rethinking of the first-time user experience. Unlocking the true consumer potential of bots- Bots today are largely used as glorified push notifications. Knock Knock is designing key parts of gameplay around bots, such as sending heroes on quests via a bot message interaction without even opening the game.

“Knock Knock’s unique model engages players in new ways across multiple platforms and has the potential to usher in the next wave of chat games that will redefine the market,” said Courtney Favreau, a venture capital partner at Raine Ventures. “The founding team has an impressive track record in the mobile and chat gaming spaces and we’re very excited to help them bring their vision to life.”

Knock Knock was founded by Andrew Friday, who was formerly a senior product manager for the Chat Games team at Zynga and Andrew N. Green, who was formerly the head of business operations at TinyCo (acquired by Jam City in 2016).

According to market research firm Statista, there are currently 5.8 billion monthly active users worldwide using chat apps, of which gamers are a large and growing segment. Knock Knock plans to launch their first game later this year on Facebook Messenger, then WeChat in early 2019.

About Knock Knock:
Knock Knock is a passionate team of developers that believe messaging platforms can create new ways to connect friends and play games. Headquartered in San Francisco, Knock Knock was founded by former EA, TinyCo, and Zynga folks who have shipped games that have generated over 100 million downloads and $500 million in revenue. For more information, please visit www.knock-knock.us

About The Raine Group
The Raine Group is a global merchant bank focused exclusively on technology, media, and telecommunications. The firm has offices in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, London, Shanghai, and Mumbai. With a global reach, Raine focuses on investment and advisory opportunities where its deep industry experience and unique network of strategic relationships can create value for portfolio companies and clients. For more information, visit www.raine.com.

Jonas “O.J” Ek
The Gaming Ground
Twitter: @TheGamingGround