LONDON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Flavourworks – the studio bringing Movies and Games together – has secured £3m in funding to further deepen its patent-pending cross-platform Touch Video technology and to expand the studio to work on an exciting pipeline of new games.
The Series A funding round has been led by Hiro Capital – the new Games, Esports and Sports technology VC Fund led by Inspired Entertainment co-founder Luke Alvarez, Games Workshop co-founder Ian Livingstone CBE and Cherry Freeman, co-founder of LoveCrafts. Sky Ventures is co-investing in Flavourworks alongside Hiro Capital. Sky Ventures is additionally an investor in Hiro.
Jack Attridge and Pavle Mihajlovic founded Flavourworks on London’s Silicon Roundabout in 2015 with a radical vision of bringing interactive stories to filmed content for a global audience. Ian Livingstone was an early supporter of the team, having started his career in branching narrative games by bringing Dungeons & Dragons to Europe in the 1970’s and later co-creating and writing the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, the iconic series which sold in excess of 20 million copies worldwide.
Flavourworks’ first title, Erica, has recently been published by Sony Interactive Entertainment and is available on the PlayStation 4 now, with mobile launches following soon.
Erica is a live-action interactive thriller where a player’s decisions shape the narrative of the female protagonist. Beyond simple binary choices, Flavourworks’ proprietary cross-platform Touch Video technology allows the player to touch the world using the touchpad on Sony’s Dualshock 4 or a mobile device screen. The player can wipe a tear off a character’s face, or peer through a door slowly so as not to be found out, in order to discover a new perspective on the story.
“Erica merges the worlds of film and video games in a way that no one's done before,” said Pavle Mihajlovic. “Our technology combines the mechanics of traditional storytelling with immersive soundtracks and next-level interactions that let you touch, feel and experience nuanced, interactive stories. This is the first time a game lets you reach out and touch a real, live-action world and have this world react to you in a meaningful way. We’re so excited to be working with our investors to help share these experiences worldwide.”
Luke Alvarez, Managing Partner of Hiro, said: “Hiro is thrilled to be investing in Flavourworks as our Fund’s first of many deals. Jack and Pavle have exactly what we look for in game entrepreneurs: they have a powerful vision of inventing a whole new genre; they have innovated both the technology and the game content to do that; and they are getting traction with some of the biggest players in the ecosystem, including Sony and Sky. Cherry, Ian and I are very optimistic about the potential for Flavourworks and we are looking forward to working with Jack and Pavle as they scale. ”
Cherry Freeman, Hiro Partner, said: “Touch Video has given Flavourworks the ability to take the concept of immersive game play to the next level. From building innovative technology to developing dynamic stories, Jack and Pavle are revolutionising how players interact with games. We are also very pleased to be investing alongside Sky Ventures.”
James McClurg, Director of Startup Investments and Partnerships at Sky said: “We have invested in the Hiro Capital Fund to discover exactly the kinds of technology and talent Hiro have found with Flavourworks. As Europe’s largest entertainment company and with innovation at our core, we see an exciting potential in Flavourworks’ Touch Video technology as it brings game-like interactivity to premium content. We are looking forward to supporting the company, as the technology develops and the content is produced out of Jack and Pavle’s studio, in the months and years to come.”
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About Flavourworks
Flavourworks is a revolutionary games studio that fuses the intensity of filmed content using real actors with the deep interactivity of narrative video games, creating a brand new genre at the intersection of movies and games. Through the use of its proprietary Touch Video technology, Flavourworks combines the mechanics of traditional storytelling with immersive soundtracks and next-level interactions that let you touch, feel and experience nuanced, interactive stories like never before. https://www.flavourworks.co/
About Hiro
Hiro Capital is a Luxembourg / London technology Venture Capital fund which invests in European and UK innovators in Games, Esports and Digital Sports. 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 sector-specific 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.
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.
