Knock Knock, a gaming startup founded by Zynga, TinyCo, and EA alumni, announced today that it has raised $2 million in seed funding towards developing mobile chat games that are playable through messaging apps.
As detailed in a press release, the funding round was led by Raine Ventures, with London Venture Partners (Supercell, Unity), Ludlow Ventures (Product Hunt), and Gregory Milken also participating.
While Knock Knock won’t be focusing on building chat fiction (digital books presented as text messages), they’re designing key parts of gameplay around bots, like sending heroes on quests via a bot message interaction without having to open the game.
Their goal revolves around changing the concept of chat games by utilizing bots in new ways by adding group chat dynamics, messaging and chat bots into the game mechanics.
The startup plans to publish their first game for Facebook Messenger later in the year, following with a WeChat title in early 2019.