As the video game industry continues to develop, some gamers have found success in making an income from their choice of entertainment. Professional gamers can make upwards of $1 million in streamed gaming tournaments and now Hoboken, New Jersey-based ZEBEDEE is offering another way for gamers to earn money as they play.
Through ZEBEDEE, game developers are able to add programmable money to any game. Developers also have the ability to choose which actions yield payments. For example, when a character drives through a set of coins as they may in Super Mario Kart, those coins can be worth actual money — specifically Bitcoin — stored in gamers’ wallets.
On Tuesday, the fintech startup pulled in $35 million in a Series B funding round led by Kingsway Capital with participation from The Raine Group and Square Enix. With its new capital, ZEBEDEE plans to allocate funding toward product development alongside growing strategic partnerships.
“We are pleased to be in a position where we can confidently scale our team and grow our business even as the macroeconomic backdrop becomes increasingly uncertain,” Simon Cowell, CEO of ZEBEDEE, said in a statement. “This funding round gives us the ability to meet our highly ambitious roadmap both in terms of building out our infrastructure to support the hundreds of millions of users that play our partners’ games, as well as hire the top-level talent needed to ensure every partner has the best possible experience working with ZEBEDEE.”
ZEBEDEE’s recent raise comes after the company’s user count increased over 10x since it announced an $11.5 million Series A round in 2021, according to a company statement.
