Hiro Capital Leads $15 Million of Games VC Investment Into Snowprint Studios, Double Loop Games and Happy Volcano Games
26.2.2021 11:55:00 EET | Business Wire | Press release
Three international video game studios are the latest investments for Hiro Capital, the entrepreneur-led Venture Capital fund focused on backing innovators in Video Games, the Metaverse, Esports and Digital Fitness.
The three mobile and cross-platform studios – Snowprint in Stockholm/Berlin, Double Loop Games in San Francisco and Happy Volcano in Belgium – will use Hiro’s investment to expand their development pipelines and accelerate global growth. They join UK and US Games studios Flavourworks, Polyarc and Lightfox in the Hiro Capital portfolio, alongside pioneers in the gamification of Games Streaming and Digital Fitness LIV.tv, Edgegap, FitXR and Nurvv.
Ian Livingstone, co-founding partner at Hiro Capital, said, "We are excited to begin 2021 by announcing Hiro's investment in three amazing games studios, Snowprint, Double Loop and Happy Volcano. Each studio has demonstrated innovation and expertise in developing fun to play games which resonate with today’s audiences. I’m especially pleased that one of the studios came through our first Dark Star™ event for emerging indies looking to scale their businesses. If only venture capital had been interested in the games sector back in the 1970s, I might not have had to sleep in a van during the early days of Games Workshop!"
Snowprint Studios was founded in 2015 in Stockholm, Sweden and has since grown with a second studio in Berlin. The team is led by industry veterans Alexander Ekvall and Patrik Lindegren, each formerly of King, John Hargelid, formerly of Paradox Interactive, and Wilhelm Osterberg, formerly of Wooga. Snowprint Studios operates their debut mobile title Legend of Solgard and is now also working on three new mobile projects, including Rivengard, a turn-based tactics game that launched globally on 21st January 2021, as well as an undisclosed AAA mobile IP coming soon out of its Berlin studio.
“We had heard great things about Hiro and have been impressed by the entire team from our very first interactions,” said Alexander Ekvall. “The team has a deep understanding of building successful games companies and this is reflected in the support they provide. The backing from Hiro means we are better equipped than ever to execute on our mission to deliver genre-defining experiences.”
Double Loop Games is a San Francisco-based social mobile game studio working on its debut title. The team is led by industry veterans Emily Greer, co-founder of Kongregate and Shelby Moledina, formerly of Warner Bros, Games and DeNA. Double Loop Games is now preparing to launch its exciting social mobile title, made for players who don't think of themselves as gamers.
"We've been thrilled with the level of insight the Hiro team brings to games and the games industry," said Emily Greer. "They immediately understood both the upside and the potential challenges around our more innovative mechanics. We look forward to a long and productive partnership with people that we know really get it."
The third investment is Happy Volcano , a new studio from Belgium that secured funding after attending Hiro Capital’s Dark Star™ VC investment summit for early stage Games studios. Last year, Happy Volcano released the critically acclaimed narrative exploration game The Almost Gone and are currently working on a new soon-to-launch cross-platform game You Suck at Parking.
“Teaming up with Hiro Capital means we can take the next step on our journey to become a leading creative game studio,” commented Jeroen Janssen, Founder and CEO at Happy Volcano. “Attending the Dark Star event in 2020 made it clear to us that Hiro brings a lot of value besides just funding. Knowing that an industry legend like Ian Livingstone is backing your vision gives the entire team confidence that we are on the right path.”
“The addition of these three exciting Games studios brings our total investments to 11, with more deals to be announced soon,” said Cherry Freeman, co-founding Partner at Hiro Capital. “At Hiro, our mission is to find talented, ambitious teams and help them grow by bringing expertise and capital. We invest in the innovators of the future, and I couldn’t think of a better start to 2021 than these three great studios.”
Luke Alvarez, Founding Partner of Hiro said: “Hiro was founded to invest in the super-sector of Games, Sports and Metaverse technologies. On every dimension, in every market, 2020/21 has been a story of strong growth - in users, sales, devices, stream views, and innovations. People fell in love, got married and graduated in games and are coming out of lockdown stronger thanks to gamified wearables and VR fitness tech. As a VC, it is exciting to see our sector focus so emphatically confirmed. Finally, Hiro is a diverse team and so are these new studios, including our first female Games founders, Emily and Shelby.”
Hiro Capital is looking for more ambitious Games entrepreneurs and will be launching the next Dark Star™ event for Games Studios in March 2021. Dark Star™ 2.0 will give Game studios looking for investment the chance to hear from Hiro Capital’s partners and portfolio entrepreneurs about how and why to position themselves for venture funding.
Hiro Capital: Investors in the Future
Hiro Capital is a London / Luxembourg technology Venture Capital fund which invests in UK, US and European innovators in Games, Metaverse Technology, Esports and Digital Fitness. Hiro Capital generally invests at the post-seed Series A and B stages. We invest both in front-end Content creators in Games, Esports and Digital Sports and in deep tech Metaverse applications of Cloud, Mobile, Streaming, Big Data, AI, Wearables, AR and VR technologies.
We back experienced entrepreneurial teams, building innovative technologies and content with a strongly differentiated proposition and with the scaling opportunity to become very large.
We are Games, Esports and Sports investors who are also Games, Esports and Sports entrepreneurs. We are entrepreneurs who back entrepreneurs. Our core belief is that Games, Esports and Digital Sports will be a central pillar of Entertainment, Economic and Social Life in the mid 21st century. We invest in the innovators who are building that future. https://hiro.capital/
- Ends -
To view this piece of content from cts.businesswire.com, please give your consent at the top of this page.
View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210226005025/en/
Contact information
Dean Barrett
dean@bastion.co.uk
+44 7802 898110
Antonella Scimemi
antonella@burlington.cc
+44 7530 815 018
About Business Wire
For more than 50 years, Business Wire has been the global leader in press release distribution and regulatory disclosure.
Subscribe to releases from Business Wire
Subscribe to all the latest releases from Business Wire by registering your e-mail address below. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Latest releases from Business Wire
Icon Solutions Showcases How Banks Can Accelerate Digital Asset Innovation with IPF9.6.2026 12:30:00 EEST | Press release
Icon Solutions – the UK fintech enabling banks to design and implement state-of-the-art payment systems – has released a reference implementation showing how banks can use the Icon Payments Framework (IPF) to accelerate support for payments processing using distributed ledger technology (DLT)-based digital assets. As IPF is agnostic to both the type of digital asset and the DLT network on which they are issued, the risk of fragmentation is reduced as adoption scales. There is growing momentum for digital assets such as stablecoins, tokenised deposits, deposit tokens and central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) to enable faster, cheaper and smarter payments. Yet the emergence of different digital asset types and DLT networks – which must also work with existing financial infrastructure – creates fragmentation and operational complexity for banks. This is compounded by legacy vendor solutions that limit choice and lock banks in, making it slow, costly and risky to make the changes require
monday.com Appoints Ben Barnett General Manager of EMEA to Drive Next Phase of Regional Growth9.6.2026 11:00:00 EEST | Press release
monday.com (Nasdaq: MNDY), the AI work platform that turns strategy into execution at scale, today announced Ben Barnett’s appointment to General Manager (GM) of Europe, the Middle East and Africa, marking a major milestone in the company’s global expansion. Ben, who has been with monday.com for five years, brings a decade of experience in senior B2B sales roles at software companies and has overseen significant, sustained growth at monday.com in the UK and Ireland since joining in 2021. In his new position, Ben’s priorities include delivering the monday.com’s EMEA go-to-market strategy, fostering key partnerships, and bolstering its newly announced AI work platform. He is based in London. Ben’s promotion comes as monday.com builds on a period of rapid regional success, with EMEA revenue up 26% year-on-year in 2025. Last year, monday.com expanded its regional EMEA headquarters in Fitzrovia, London, now occupying 80,000 sq ft across three floors where more than 370 employees are based,
Interactive Brokers Launches Commission-Free iShares ETFs from BlackRock through Recurring Investment Feature Across Europe9.6.2026 11:00:00 EEST | Press release
Interactive Brokers (Nasdaq: IBKR), an automated global broker, today announced the launch of Commission-Free ETFs within its Recurring Investment feature for eligible individual investors across the European Economic Area. Investors can now access more than 500 commission-free iShares ETFs from BlackRock spanning a broad range of asset classes and strategies, including bonds, equities, themes and sectors. The iShares ETFs available on the IBKR platform give individual investors an accessible, cost-efficient way to build well-diversified portfolios. Since investors pay no trading commissions, more of their capital stays invested and compounding over time, while a broad selection of funds across asset classes makes it straightforward to construct and rebalance portfolios. iShares ETFs are available commission-free through IBKR's Recurring Investments feature, allowing investors to automate their periodic ETF contributions. Clients can select individual ETFs or ETF portfolios, set a cont
Forrester Reveals The Top 10 Highest-Performing Brands In Its 2026 Global Total Experience Score Rankings At Its CX Events9.6.2026 10:30:00 EEST | Press release
According to Forrester’s (Nasdaq: FORR) 2026 global Total Experience Score rankings of 375 brands evaluated across Asia Pacific, Europe, and North America in 2025 and 2026, 41% improved their scores while only 3% declined. A compelling total experience — calculated by combining Forrester’s Customer Experience Index (CX Index™), Brand Experience Index (BX Index™), and, for the first time, the new Employee Experience Index (EX Index™) into a unified view of performance — can drive outsized growth for brands. While brand experience and customer experience can each drive revenue independently, the impact multiplies when they are orchestrated together as a unified total experience. In the US, for example, companies delivering a strong total experience see significantly higher returns from retention and enrichment: Automotive firms achieve a 2.6x revenue lift and retailers see a 3.8x increase. The new research finds that CX scores improved in North America, European brands remained mostly st
IQM Announces Novel Quantum Error Correction Approach Toward Fault-Tolerant Quantum Computing9.6.2026 10:00:00 EEST | Press release
IQM Quantum Computers, the global leader in superconducting quantum computers, has developed a novel quantum error-correcting code that achieves up to three orders of magnitude lower logical error rates than the surface code, also requiring up to eight times fewer physical qubits. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260609533201/en/ IQM´s breakthrough technology, called barbell codes. Unlike many alternative high-performance quantum error-correction approaches, the new code also maintains a comparatively low hardware complexity, marking a significant advancement toward scalable fault-tolerant quantum computing. Quantum error correction remains one of the defining challenges in the race toward practical quantum computing. Errors introduced by noise must be corrected faster than they accumulate, a requirement that previous approaches demanded either complex hardware or significant performance trade-offs, which IQM's
In our pressroom you can read all our latest releases, find our press contacts, images, documents and other relevant information about us.
Visit our pressroom