ByteBrew raises $4M for integrated mobile game analytics platform

ByteBrew has raised $4 million for its all-in-one mobile game analytics platform that provides developers with tools they need to grow their games business.

It may come as no surprise that former game developers created this game analytics platform. What’s pretty amazing about it is that it was built by a team of just two brothers in San Diego, California. And as a a free product, it has more than 5,000 mobile game studios using it.

Konvoy Ventures led the round. Other participants include VC firm Valhalla Ventures, early-stage venture fund Node Ventures, and other angels. Konvoy principal, Taylor Hurst, will be joining ByteBrew’s board. The funding will be used to further develop new technologies for developers, and expand the team.

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Created by Cameron Hozouri (CEO) and Kian Hozouri (COO), ByteBrew equips developers with a suite of out-of-the-box growth products ranging from real-time analytics and monetization tracking to player progression and ad attribution measurement. It is available in just one platform and software development kit (SDK).

Developers can use it to get a complete understanding of their game’s performance to make key decisions about game design, development, monetization, and user acquisition, said Kian Hozouri in an interview with GamesBeat.

“ByteBrew came about from an indie development studio that we had,” Kian Hozouri said. “When we were developing games, we were working with a lot of different publishers to scale them. At one point, we were making one game every. So there was a lot of development going on. And we were always learning.”

He added, “It’s a game developer’s dream to eventually say, ‘Hey, I don’t need a publisher anymore, I can go and publish my own games. I have the experience, the toolset, the technology to be able to go out and scale.’ But when it came time for us to actually do that, we had a game that showed all the marketability metrics that it was going to be a success. It had a 50%, day one retention.”

But in the end, the game didn’t make money. That was because the devs used five to seven different platforms to scale the games. Each cost money to use, and those costs just grew as they scaled the games.

So the brothers decided to make everything themselves, creating everything a developer needed in one platform and one integration. That became ByteBrew. They launched it for free in July 2021. But instead of getting 50, they had more than 2,500 come on by the end of 2021. Now the number has reached 5,000.

“It was bigger than our wildest dreams,” he said. “Even to this day, we’re still two people.”

The platform handles analytics, live ops, push notifications, attribution, monetization and progression.

ByteBrew’ analytics

ByteBrew not only answers vital questions like “how do users play my game?” and “where do my players start losing interest?”, but also gives developers the ability to take action to optimize their games remotely by using ByteBrew’s live ops products for remote configs, a/b testing and push notifications; all without ever needing to update their game’s app storefronts.

“We built ByteBrew to re-define what is considered industry standard for game developers, so developers can stop paying for expensive services with complex integrations that leave their data siloed in multiple segmented platforms,” said Kian Hozouri. “ByteBrew removes the growth barriers developers face by providing all the tools and services they need to hit the top chart in one platform.”

ByteBrew has experienced unprecedented growth, with over 5,000 developers joining the platform since its launch in 2021. In July alone, ByteBrew analyzed over 600 billion user events on the platform.

Many of the top game publishers on the app stores are already using ByteBrew’s advanced features to empower their development teams and games all over the globe. Mobile games and app developers can access ByteBrew for free in a matter of seconds, through their self-service platform.

Raising money

“It’s incredible to see what Cameron and Kian have achieved since they launched ByteBrew. They’ve changed the way mobile games developers work, allowing them to easily analyze the usability of their games in real-time and give them the ability to scale-up new ideas quicker than before,” said Konvoy’s Hurst in a statement. “It’s exciting to think about what ByteBrew can achieve with a bigger team behind them, and how they will inevitably become an industry leader within the mobile games analytics vertical for years to come.”

As for raising the money in the downturn, Kian Hozouri, “I don’t want to say the game industry is recession proof, but it is recession resilient. And so there’s a lot of opportunity even in a recession to be able to grow. It reminds me of the days of Jason Citron, founder of OpenFeint, which succeeded in the early days of the iPhone as a free social tech tool for game devs. It gained thousands of free-to-play game developers for its platform and sold it to Gree for $104 million.

“There’s a lot of exciting stuff that we’re working on. And we honestly can’t wait to launch all those products,” Kian Hozouri said.

Logically, this kind of company should not exist, given how long larger companies have been doing analytics on smartphone games.

“Because we were game developers previously, we have a really unique insight into what developers need,” Kian Hozouri said. “We had a pulse on what game developers needed. We believed it was an issue out there for all developers out there. And it turns out it definitely was.”

And rather than integrate products from different vendors, the company has mostly been creating its own custom-built tools via its own centralized software development kit (SDK).

“We’re builders. And we’ll always build and develop new products. Whenever there’s something that a developer needs, or we know that a developer would need, we just go out and build it,” Kian Hozouri said.

Kian credited Cameron’s prowess as an engineer for getting the tech done.

“He can develop like there’s no tomorrow,” Kian Hozouri said.

Originally appeared on: TheSpuzz