Niantic Labs has had incredible success with the Pokémon Go mobile game and have now got a funding round of $190m which will surely be handy as they’re preparing to release the highly expected Harry Potter AR game.
The details on the funding round are little, but according to a filing with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission, it has 26 undisclosed investors. According to The Wall Street Journal’s report back in December, Niantic was seeking a new funding round which involved IVP, aXiomatic Gaming and Samsung.
Among the investors, Google, The Pokémon Company and Spark Capital were also involved with Niantic, now Labs raising a total of $415m from funding rounds as the apps developed by them continue to be successful.
In 2018, according to market analysis firm Sensor Tower, Pokémon Go made $800m, which is 35% more than the revenues in 2017.
Nonetheless, Pokémon Go hasn’t seen the same height as it saw after it was launched in 2016, but getting new features kept it alive and growing.
Thanks to the events, trainer battles, and new Pokémon, other games were made for different platforms: Let’s Go Pikachu and Eevee – on the Nintendo Switch, where all the Pokémon you catch in the mobile app can be transferred to the console game. Since it was released, Pokémon Go has generated more than $2bn globally.
Harry Potter: Wizards Unite
The funding comes right before Harry Potter: Wizards Unite gets to be released.
If you’re a fan, then you should be very excited, as the game will be released this year and it will be similar to Pokémon Go, but it will be your favorite wizarding world.
Niantic is having great success with Pokémon Go and is also ambitious in improving the AR tech. Last year, they acquired Seismic Gaming and Matrix Mill which is a company specialized in machine learning AR. They are now working on creating the ‘occlusion’ tech with Matrix Mill to make the AR characters appear more convincingly in the real world – like go around objects and disappear behind people in the real world.
Robert J. Smith is still early into his career as tech reporter but has already had his work published in many major publications including JoyStiq and Android Authority. In regards to academics, Robert earned a degree in business from Fordham University. Robert has passion for emerging technology and covers upcoming products and breakthroughs in science and tech.