IndieBI raises $3M USD from games industry luminaries to bring modern business intelligence and sales optimization to PC, Console, and VR games

For game developers and publishers, the chore of collecting their most important sales and marketing metrics often feels like a special circle of hell. Aggregating fresh data from across a dozen relevant sales platforms can take hours of frustrating menial work. Analyzing that data to find good insights is so time consuming it’s borderline impossible for most people. All of this effort makes gamedevs across the board miss out on valuable business opportunities and leave meaningful amounts of revenue untapped.

IndieBI makes this effort go away.

In a nutshell, IndieBI is a suite of clever data aggregation and analytics tools for PC, Console, and VR video games. It helps game developers and publishers collect, crunch, and deeply understand all of their sales, marketing numbers, and financial outcomes. All of this leads to smarter decisions and better planning. This means more games sold down the line, more stable studios full of happier gamedev people, and more games successfully released for all of us to enjoy.

We originally built IndieBI way back in 2018 as a homebrew tool to help us manage our sales at SUPERHOT — an independent PC/VR/Console games studio. With games shipped across a dozen major sales platforms, tracking our sales and making smart decisions was quickly becoming a huge challenge and a source of anxiety. We were starved for anything resembling modern business intelligence and there were exactly zero options available off-the-shelf that’d properly hit the spot for us. Efficient business management is a pretty hard problem — and admittedly not the most glamorous aspect of game development — so there really was nobody in the industry working to solve this.

So we went ahead and started solving it ourselves.

IndieBI automatically grabs all of your freshest data from all of your most relevant distribution platforms, crunches it up, and displays it for you in neat interactive dashboards and advisory tools. No manual acquisition needed. All of your most exciting numbers are just there — ready for you, updated and fresh every morning.

The insights IndieBI provided for us felt like a breath of fresh air. They quickly translated to very meaningful sales improvements for all of our games. Changes to our discounting strategy and regional pricing alone amounted to hundreds of thousands of dollars of increased revenue, more than footing the bill for creating this early version of IndieBI for us.

Encouraged by this early success we started refining and sharing our tools with other friendly indie (and not so indie) studios in the industry. Traction and interest picked up quickly and for the last couple of years IndieBI has been steadily growing and developing with select partners in an invite-only beta.

We’ve since tracked nearly $2B in sales across 1700+ titles from a growing community of over a hundred amazing games companies. Our partners range in scale from underdog one-person indie studios all the way to hugely successful companies like Innersloth, Harmonix, and entire funds and publishers like Raw Fury and Kowloon Nights.

“IndieBI has been life changing for Kowloon Nights. We are funding self-publishing studios across the world, allowing them to directly collect revenue and sales data from the platforms themselves. Tracking 50+ games across 12+ platforms used to be a real challenge for us.
Now, IndieBI provides us with a live dashboard showing how all of our titles are doing in real time.”
- Alexis Garavaryan, CEO of Kowloon Nights and Kepler Interactive

And today marks an important milestone for IndieBI, as we’re super happy to announce that we’ve just finished raising a games industry-driven angel round of $3M USD. 🎉

We’ve taken great care to structure this round around our own games industry roots. We’ve built our investor circle strictly out of games studios, publishers, individual studio heads and founders with rock solid games industry backgrounds. With their support, we’re keeping IndieBI firmly grounded in the industry we’re serving and entirely independent.

It’s always been a platform built by the games industry for the games industry, and we feel extremely privileged to announce that now it’s also 100% funded by the games industry!

As part of this round, we’ve secured the support of a powerhouse collective of games industry investors such as Olga and John Graham (Humble Bundle), Nate Mitchell (Mountaintop), Forest Willard (Innersloth), Cy Wise and Alex Schwartz (absurd:joy), Paweł Feldman, Chris Jurney, Matias Myllyrinne (Redhill), Anna Sweet & Nate Salpeter, Lindsey Rostal (Timberline), Brjann Sigurgeirsson (Thunderful Group), Alastair Hebson (SUPERHOT), Derek Bradley (A44), Tom Beardsmore (Coatsink), Richard Wu (Seed Studio), Raphael van Lierop (Hinterland), and Alexis Garavaryan (Kowloon Nights and Kepler Interactive).

We’re also backed by the teams and founders of some of the companies already involved in our beta, including Innersloth (Among Us), Hinterland (The Long Dark), SUPERHOT, and Boneloaf (Gang Beasts).

“Information and advice on sales modelling and pricing from IndieBI has facilitated the scheduling of more frequent and aggressive sales and promotions, significantly increasing revenues for our studio.”
- James Brown, CEO of Boneloaf — creators of Gang Beasts

The individual support of our investors means a lot to us and the funds will allow IndieBI to continue growing rapidly. We’re setting out to provide a universal, industry-driven data intelligence platform for games studios and publishers the world over, and this raise gives us the credibility and resources we need to build it.

We hope the funding will serve to propel IndieBI towards becoming a true industry standard. IndieBI is envisioned as an independent and universal analytics and sales optimization platform available for everyone building and publishing PC, Console and VR games — no matter if they’re already a publicly traded international games publisher, or if they’re just starting out with their first indie title.

We’re extremely excited for the leaps towards this goal that this funding milestone unlocks for us.

IndieBI already does a lot of heavy lifting. You can track stuff across all of your games, platforms, and regions in new and wonderful ways. You’re reminded about available discounts, you get basic forecasting, and you can collect all of your wishlist and visibility metrics in one place. And yet, there’s so much more we’re still working to build.

The traction we’ve seen so far and the results we’ve seen our partners achieve are extremely motivating.

We’ve already seen the analysis and insights provided by the platform as far as triple the expected sales revenues for some of our partners and yield millions of dollars of upside for developers when negotiating deals with major platforms.

However, there’s still a very long road ahead of us — and we expect no part of it to be easy.

IndieBI’s on the very forefront of sales optimization for our industry. There’s tons of exciting research and trailblazing still in front of us. We’re hoping the momentum from this round and the enthusiasm of our early traction keeps propelling us forward, helps grow our team (come work with us at jobs.indiebi.com!), and allows us to reach more and more partners around the world (sign up to join the beta waiting list at indiebi.com!).

We’re looking forward to the work ahead and we’re excited for the meaningful change IndieBI will bring to our industry over the coming months and years.

Tom and Callum, the founders of IndieBI hanging out with a gaggle geese. The geese did not participate financially in this round. They are just geese.

IndieBI is headed by Tom Kaczmarczyk (co-founder of SUPERHOT) and Callum Underwood (founder of Robot Teddy), with Alexis Garavaryan (CEO of Kowloon Nights, and the recently announced Kepler Interactive) on the board as a key advisor.

It’s built by a global team of engineers, designers, and analysts with headquarters in Łódź, Poland.

Come work with us at jobs.indiebi.com!
Sign up for beta access at indiebi.com!