Sanlo: Game Development Reimagined
XYZ is an early stage venture fund focused on enterprise and fintech companies. As such, we’ve developed some ~theorems~ on where we see these verticals going in the future.
Fintech is becoming a broader and more inclusive category — the pandemic has accelerated the iteration of new asset classes as individuals turn to non-traditional forms of monetization. With quarantine, mobile gaming has considerably increased as both a new source of entertainment and of income. These trends, in tandem with surplus time, has enabled the developer community to grow and to be more strategic about how they scale.
This rate of growth is largely due to a low barrier to entry, a less complex developer process, and an inclusive culture with more than 2.7 billion gamers world-wide. The latter point is best illustrated by the fact that about 20% of top mobile titles from the past few years are from indie games. Importantly, this rich innovative activity is typically acquired by larger studios given the limited tools and resources these smaller players have at their disposal. As one gaming founder put it, “It's a complex job to be a successful developer. You need to build a game that works, find a way to acquire players, make sure that it happens at scale, and that you have access to capital.”
We take the view that like all types of creators, gamers, and app developers should have tools to be independent, go faster, and monetize their craft to scale so that they can focus on what they’re uniquely suited to do. That’s why we backed Sanlo, a company whose mission is to support and empower gaming and consumer app companies to run profitable businesses via a robust and vertically-focused platform offering financial services. Gaming, and entertainment at large, is a beautiful and singular industry that continues to attract entrants at an exponential rate each year.
Sanlo puts these developers first with the firm belief that finance should not be a mystery and left to a select few — the recent $179.9M credit line extended by Supercell to Metacore is certainly not the norm — and every company with great products should have access to the advice and capital that they need to scale.
Similarly, we firmly believe that co-founders Olya Caliujnaia and Will Liu have the right expertise to execute this vision. We first got to know Olya when she joined the XYZ team as an EIR in January of 2020 where she put her years of experience in fintech and gaming towards starting a new company. We had a front row seat to her and Will’s journey discovering how developers lacked the financial insights they needed to grow their business through deep customer research. Their commitment to democratizing financial tools for this underserved community is unwavering. If you are passionate about broadening access to financial tools and capital for the mobile and gaming communities, the team is hiring and eager to meet you.
