Kooply taps into $18M from Microsoft and more for a mobile games dev platform still in stealth

techcrunch.com:

Mobile dominates the world of gaming, with smartphone and tablet games generating $93.2 billion in revenues in 2021, more than console ($50.4 billion) and PC ($36.7 billion) combined according to gaming market research firm Newzoo. And that’s before you consider the thousands of popular apps out there that are not strictly games but rely heavily on gaming mechanics to entice users.

Now, banking on the idea that both professional developers and more casual enthusiasts are going to want to build even more mobile games in the future, an Israeli startup called Kooply is announcing funding from key investors to build out a mobile games development platform.

The company is still in stealth mode — it hopes to have a soft launch later this year — but in the meantime it has picked up $18 million in a seed round co-led by Microsoft (via its M12 fund), TPY Capitial, and Israeli mobile casino games giant Playtika — with Aleph Venture Partners, Entrée Capital, Glilot Capital Partners and Samsung Next also participating. The money will be used for hiring, and to continue investing in R&D and building out Kooply’s platform ahead of its launch.

Kooply’s CEO Ido Yablonka — who co-founded the company with Vadim Zak and Guy Pitelko last year — would not get very specific about what the company is building when we talked about the seed funding the other day, instead talking about the challenge that they have identified and want to address.

That challenge is that while there are a lot of mobile games on the market already, a lot of them are not very good, either in how they are built, or how they meet what consumers want, or in how they are amplified in the world — or a combination of all three.

“When you look at the App Store and Google Play,