GameAnalytics Scores $5.5M Series A, Hires Ex-Aol European MD As CEO

GameAnalytics, a free analytics platform for games developers, has leveled-up its funding. The Copenhagen-headquartered startup, which also has a sales office in London and a development hub in Berlin, has closed a $5.5 million Series A round.

The new funding comes from previous backers — Sunstone Capital, CrunchFund (Disclaimer: TechCrunch founder Mike Arrington is a Partner), Jimmy Maymann (CEO, Huffington Post) and René Rechmann (President, Maker Studio) — alongside new investor, Beta Angels, and the company’s newly-recruited management team. It brings the total raised by GameAnalytics to $8 million.

Those changes in the startup’s management sees the recruitment of a new CEO, and a number of other executive hires. Replacing co-founder Morten Wulff in the top job is former Managing Director of Aol, Luke Aviet. Meanwhile, another ex-Aol employee, Nick Roveta, who held the role of Head of Product and Partnerships at the U.S. tech/media company (and owner of TechCrunch), becomes GameAnalytics’ VP of Strategic Partnerships, and Claus Moseholm (founder of GoViral, which was also acquired by Aol) is the company’s new Chief Commercial Officer.

As its name suggests, GameAnalytics’ raison d’etre is providing games developers with a highly granular view of who their gamers are and what they are actually doing, and in doing so, helping developers make crucial design and business/strategy decisions.

“All-in-all our platform is a free service aimed at helping developers of all sizes to become more succesful in an increasingly competitive mobile games landscape,” founder Morten Wulff tells me. “With GameAnalytics, developers can track the behavior of their players and monetizers to optimize their games for better acquiring players, engaging players and generating revenue.”

In part, the games analytics platform makes this possible via pre-defined metrics that tell developers things like: How many people are playing the game? Where are players coming from? How many players actually make a purchase? How long do players spend in the game? What content in the game is most popular? And at what point do players stop playing the game?

“Many great game developers are more focused on building great game experiences and gameplay but often do not have a good grasp of how to measure themselves and their performance,” adds Wulff. “GamAnalytics makes this easy by asking the right questions beforehand and making it really easy to get the answers. It’s like an analyst in a box — for free.”

To that end, GameAnalytics has close to 14,000 registered game developers, who, combined, have a reach of over 500 million unique players. However, it’s yet to monetise the service, which Wulff says will come early next year now that the startup is reaching scale.

“We’re now quickly reaching a critical mass with our platform our next goal is to launch various other value adding services that will help game developers get the most out of their games — especially focusing on helping the long tail of massively talented indie developers who are currently not reaching their full commercial potential. These new services are currently in the making and will not be free of charge,” he says.