AFI, which serves the game server platform ‘The End’, announced on the 7th that it has successfully attracted 5.3 billion won of Series A investment.
In this investment led by DSC Investment, existing investment companies such as JIU Investment and Blue Point Partners, as well as new investors Kakao Ventures, Lighthouse Combine Invest, and Schmidt participated. As a result, AFI secured about 7 billion won in accumulated investment following the pre-series A in October last year.
With this investment as an opportunity, AFI will advance its ‘Backnd’ service. The back end is Korea’s first game server software as a service (SaaS). It provides server functions necessary for game development, such as membership registration and probability management, in the form of cloud APIs. This allows game developers to easily build game servers and server functions without server knowledge.
The background of this investment is the growth of the latter. After the official launch in 2018, the back end has grown rapidly based on the demand for game server development. As of September of this year, the cumulative number of registered developers at the end of the year was about 2,800, a 40% increase from the same month last year (about 2000). The cumulative number of game users has reached 49 million.
AFI plans to continue its growth by strengthening its global infrastructure. In particular, it will open regions (data centers) in North America and Europe to strengthen the capabilities of each country. According to the report ‘Game Spotlight 2022 Review’ published in May, the global game market that the back end is targeting is expected to reach $220 billion (about 301 trillion won) this year.
Kwon Oh-hyeon, CEO of AFI, said, “We were able to attract Series A investment thanks to growing together with domestic game developers. .
On the other hand, AfI renewed the logo at the end of the last 1st. The new logo was created with the motif of semicolons (;) and commas, which are often used in programming languages. The company explained that it refers to an facilitator who accompanies the customer both in the development journey and at the end.