Lumi Interactive CEO on making the world (and games) a kinder place
Danielle Partis
News Editor
Wednesday 6th July 2022
In an industry (and a world) that prioritises speed, trends and the next best thing, mobile startup Lumi Interactive wants to give its audience a space to slow down.
Bolstered by a recent $6.75 million investment led by Andreessen Horowitz, the Australian studio is poised to build out its team and deliver a full launch of its debut mobile game later this year.
Lumi's ethos is a simple one, according to the studio's CEO and co-founder Lauren Clinnick. It wants to make the world a kinder place.
"Our vision comes from our desire to focus on underrepresented consumers, women and non-binary folks in particular," Clinnick tells GamesIndustry.biz. "It also comes from our drive to create experiences that deliver mental wellbeing benefits for our community."
Clinnick's own background is in marketing, and she has worked on promotional campaigns "from fancy fruit juices to to encryption hardware." In 2014, she co-founded a games marketing agency, Lumi Consulting, before moving into development in 2018 by co-founding Lumi Interactive with Christina Chen, now chief product officer.
The pair initially crossed paths almost a decade ago at The Arcade, an industry co-working space in Melbourne, and bonded over a mutual interest in how free-to-play was changing the mobile market.
Chen has a technical background, previously working in supercomputing at Microsoft before moving to work on the payment systems behind Xbox Live, and later as a senior producer at the Shanghai branch of EA-owned PopCap Games. Chen is also a co-founder of games publisher Surprise Attack, which went on to become Fellow Traveller.
In 2022, Lumi Interactive is a team of 11 working towards a full release of Kinder World,
Read more on gamesindustry.biz
