Carry1st：非洲顶级游戏发行商靠押注支付而非爆款胜出

做的是什么生意

Carry1st develops, licenses and publishes mobile games across Africa (Call of Duty: Mobile among them) and runs Pay1st, a payments and virtual-goods commerce platform that lets players pay in local currency via mobile money, bank transfer, cards and crypto; founded in Cape Town, South Africa, in 2018.

启动资金：$2.5M seed led by CRE Venture Capital (2020); $6M Series A with Riot Games, Konvoy, Raine Ventures and TTV Capital (May 2021); $20M Series A extension led by a16z with Avenir and Google's Africa Investment Fund (Jan 2022); $27M pre-Series B led by BITKRAFT (Jan 2023); over $60M total by the Sony Innovation Fund deal (Disrupt Africa, 2024-01-31).

起因

Cordel Robbin-Coker, Lucy Hoffman and Tinotenda Mundangepfupfu founded Carry1st in Cape Town in 2018. Robbin-Coker, who had worked in investment banking in New York, saw Africa's smartphone adoption racing ahead of any way to pay for games: storefronts priced in dollars ignored mobile money and local currency. Carry1st first proved demand with its own titles (Carry1st Trivia was the No.1 game in Nigeria and Kenya in April 2020, about 1.5M downloads) and raised a $2.5M seed led by CRE Venture Capital to fund its real ambition: becoming the region's publisher of record, in the mold of Sea's Garena.

经过

Carry1st shifted from studio to full-stack publisher, signing seven games from six studios (Tilting Point's SpongeBob: Krusty Cook-Off, CrazyLabs, Raketspel) and building Carry1st Shop, a virtual-goods marketplace paid in local currency. Riot Games and Konvoy led a $6M Series A in May 2021; in Jan 2022 a16z led a $20M extension, its first investment in an Africa-headquartered company, with Avenir and Google's Africa Investment Fund. In July 2022 The President, made by Nairobi's Mekan Games through Carry1st's CrazyHubs accelerator, hit No.1 on US download charts, and revenue grew 10x over the year. BITKRAFT led a $27M pre-Series B in Jan 2023, the same month Riot chose Pay1st to pilot local payments in Africa.

结果

Carry1st is still scaling. In Jan 2024 Sony Innovation Fund: Africa made it the fund's first investment (size undisclosed, from Sony's $10M Africa allocation), with PlayStation and console partnership on the table; Disrupt Africa tallied over $60M raised and partners including Riot Games, Activision (Call of Duty: Mobile) and Supercell. By 2026 Carry1st ran its Africa Cup for the third year as the official African qualifier for the Call of Duty: Mobile World Championship, with Mentos back as a sponsor for the Abuja finals, extending the publishing and payments thesis into esports.

可借鉴之处

在无人能付费的市场，瓶颈是收款而非内容：掌控支付和分发层，从Riot到Sony的全球巨头就会成为客户而非对手。