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UK developer NaturalMotion Games has secured $11 million in funding to finance the expansion of its US and London operations.
Speaking to Develop, the studio’s CEO Torsten Reil said the money would be used to scale up its development resource and grow the company’s staff count from 130 to 160 employees.
He also revealed to that the investment would go toward a new bigger office just south of Market in San Francisco, where the developer is looking to recruit heavily.
It will also be used to crank up the number of games being developed at the studio.
“We are spending this money on scaling up further our development resource,” said Reil.
“We believe there is this huge opportunity in mobile social gaming by combining high-end, console quality visuals and polish with mobile usage patterns – being able to play in short bursts and many times a day with an overall progression arc."
He added: “What we’re looking to do is scale this up across our internal development teams both here in Oxford, London and San Francisco. In San Francisco in particular we are building up a bigger studio now. We are about to move into offices in south of Market, which is pretty much where it’s happening right now, and scale up our dev capacity there.”
NaturalMotion raised the $11million worth of investment from VC firm Benchmark Capital in its series B funding round, with Mitch Lasky to join the company’s board of directors.
Lasky has previously helped fund developers such as Riot Games and most recently invested $5.5m in Journey studio Thatgamecompany.
NaturalMotion has developed titles such as BackBreaker and free-to-play iOS title MyHorse, the latter of which has been downloaded more than ten million times since release.
