2023-06-16 12:22:45
In recent years, a profusion of platforms for equity crowdfunding sprouted in the market — allowing retail investors to bet on startups or other alternative products.
Bernardo Barroso, however, thinks that one was still missing.
The former stock analyst at Absoluto Partners has just founded Future Labs, a crowdfunding focused only on the gaming niche.
The startup wants to help game developers raise funds to launch new products, one of the main pain points for these companies today.
“There are several platforms for crowdfundingbut it doesn’t have any exclusives for the games market,” Barroso told the Brazil Journal.
According to him, the startup’s goal is to create a sense of community and ecosystem around Future Labs, allowing investors to interact with studios, and studios to exchange stickers with each other.
“We want the company to be worth more just by entering our ecosystem. And that will happen because we will have investments that will be able to help each other.”
One benchmark from Future Labs in this sense is Y Combinator, the startup accelerator from Silicon Valley. “They created this idea of an ecosystem very well. Startups want to join Y Combinator not only for the capital, but for everything that this ecosystem adds.”
Future Labs has just launched and has yet to make any offers. The first is scheduled for the end of this month.
To create the startup, Barroso raised BRL 1 million with family and friendswhich will fund the company’s cost structure in the first year.
Like every platform crowdfunding, Future Labs’ revenue is a percentage of the amounts raised by companies on the platform. Future Labs’ goal is to make four offers this year, raising from R$ 250 thousand to R$ 1 million in each. Next year, the goal is to make six to eight offers.
According to the entrepreneur, one of the game market differentials is that there is a factor that goes beyond the financial return in the investment decision.
“A lot of people decide to invest in a new game because they really like the project and want to see that game come to life,” he said. “Obviously the financial issue is also decisive, but it has this additional component.”
One possibility for investors to exit are M&As. Another way to return the investment is with the payment of dividends. “Developers have a period of cash burn high to develop the game, but then the income from the projects tends to be very high.”
In the market, one of the most recurrent criticisms of crowdfunding of startups is that they end up generating a certain amount of adverse selection, since the startups that choose to raise capital there are generally those that did not manage to pass through the selection filters of investment funds.
For Barroso, this is true for startups, but much less relevant in the universe of games. “The games market in Brazil is much more backward than the startup market. There are few people looking at games, much less renowned funds.”
The launch of Future Labs comes at a positive moment for the crowdfunding market.
A few months ago, the CVM approved regulatory changes that increased the revenue limit for companies that can raise money through these platforms — from BRL 9 million to BRL 40 million — in addition to the maximum volume that can be raised in a round and the amount that each investor can allocate.
Peter Arbex
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