Indonesia’s Touchten Games secures series C round funding from Gree and 500 Startups

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CEO Anton Soeharyo (third from left), COO Rokimas Soeharyo (third from right), and CTO Dede Indrapurna (second from left)

See the original story in Japanese.

Touchten Games is a Jakarta-based game studio which has developed mobile games like Ramen Chain and Sushi Chain, a gamified O2O (offline-to-online) platform called Touchten Platform, and it also conducted a successful Kickstarter campaign for Target Acquired, a side-scrolling run and gun mobile game.

The company announced today that it has fundraised from Japanese mobile game giant Gree and Silicon Valley-based startup investment fund 500 Startups in a series C round. Details of the investment have not been disclosed but we were told that it is worth around 7-figures in US dollars according to unnamed sources. This is followed by their series B round back from November of 2013 to March of 2014, funding from Japan’s CyberAgent Ventures, Japanese anime studio TMS Entertainment, Singapore’s UOB Venture Management, and Indonesia’s Ideosource.

The Bridge spoke with Touchten Games Co-founder and CEO Anton Soeharyo:

We’ve been developing game titles to date, but we want to be a game publisher with a platform as well as keeping developing gaming titles. With the platform, we can invite many game developers in Indonesia and create business opportunities for them.

To make this possible, we are adding several social features to the Touchten Platform, such as a gifting feature, a battling feature (gamification), and an analytics system which typically depends on third-party platforms.

But developing this analytics system costs so much. Unlike analytics for websites, measurements using sessions or links which typical third-party analytics platforms are offering will make no sense for mobile game apps. We need to add an analytic system to our gaming publishing platform.

When we can create the one useful for gaming developers, we would like them not only in Indonesia and other Southeast Asian countries but also in the rest of the world to use it for distributing their titles.

In Southeast Asia, there are many game developers but few publishers distributing the former’s titles, which is a recurring problem. So Touchten Games found a business potential here in the gap. With the partnership with Gree, Touchten will be able to leverage experiences for game publishing that Gree has acquired for many years in Japan. This will also give the Indonesian startup conveniences to develop and market localized versions of game titles from Gree. Furthermore, we were told that a reason behind the investment at this time includes Gree’s intention that they want to launch O2O businesses in the Southeast Asian region.

Touchten Games was founded in 2009. We are not yet familiar with their exit plan. However, seeing how Soeharyo have been recently speaking or behaving, I think he is getting more interest in nourishing a startup ecosystem in Indonesia and the one connecting Indonesia and Japan, rather than running a startup. It will be interesting to see how the success of Touchten Platform will help many game developers in the region better reach the global market.

Edited by “Tex” Pumeroy
Proofread by Kurt Hanson