Metafy, a Pittsburgh-based video game coaching platform co-founded by CEO Josh Fabian in 2020, announced the close of its $25 million Series A capital round, infusing it with enough funds that'll allow it to nearly double its 34 person, full-time staff by the end of the year.
It ranks as one of the largest fundraising rounds for a Pittsburgh company in years and comes shortly after the news that the startup acquired a British-based competitor named GamersRdy. Following the close of its $8.6 million seed round in May 2021, Fabian said Metafy has raised more than $33 million to date.
New York-based investment firm Tiger Global Management LLC, which has invested in companies like Facebook, Instacart and LinkedIn, and Miami-based venture capital firm Seven Seven Six, run by Reddit co-founder Alexis Kerry Ohanian, led the funding round. Fabian also noted several angel investors who supported the most recent round, including Steven Galanis, CEO of video sharing platform Cameo, as well as popular YouTubers Lachlan Power and Cody Ko, who combined have nearly 21 million subscribers tuning in to watch their video game streams.
For Fabian, the latest funding raise, and those that came before it, is something a year ago he said he never could have imagined happening; launching and running a startup with a $0 valuation to one that's estimated at being worth $105 million.
"It's flabbergasting, it's humbling, it's terrifying — all the words, but I feel good and I feel good because this money enables me to continue building a world-class team," Fabian said. "We're a software company through and through, and that requires incredibly expensive people to be on the team and to help build out the technology we're trying to build."
With Metafy, users of the platform can book private, one-on-one video game coaching sessions from champion-level coaches who offer the latest skills and insights on popular video games like Fortnite, but also physical board games like chess. Coaches on the platform, some of whom Metafy claims to rank among the world’s top 1% of players themselves, create their own schedules and set their own compensation rates. Metafy doesn't charge the coaches to use the platform, instead, it places a 5% fee for students to pay upon reserving a session.
Fabian said Metafy has more than 2,000 students who are using its platform monthly out of the 20,000 who have used it at least once over the past year, which also saw it log over 1,000 coaches offering lessons on the platform. That translates to about $200,000 in revenue per month or $2.4 million in revenue per year, though Fabian said that's a conservative estimate given the sustained 10% average month-over-month growth that the company has seen consistently over the past year. It also surpassed $1 million in gross merchandise volume — funds that are transferred directly to the coaches — in 2021.
The latest funding round proved to be so successful that's it's actually more than the startup needs at present, Fabian said. This will allow Metafy to put a significant portion of the funds into its proverbial war chest for future expenses, something he theorized will prove to be an immense advantage as he imagines a "nuclear winter" in terms of funding availability in 2022 compared to the heightened levels of investment seen in startups in 2021.
But as part of Metafy's most-recent fundraising close, Fabian said the company will put aside $1 million over the next 18 to 24 months to fund Metafy community-endorsed gaming events. More on those details to come later, he said.
"With this money, 2022 is going to make 2021 look like an amateur event," Fabian said. "It's a significant amount of cash and it enables us to do things in terms of growth that have been previously unheard of in the gaming category. I'm wildly excited."
Come the close of 2022, Fabian hopes to have over 60 full-time workers on the company's payroll and is looking to fill roles relating to product work such as design and development but also leadership positions around data, analytics, community and operations support. While it calls Pittsburgh home and it's where the largest concentration of its workers reside, Fabian said he views Metafy as a globally remote company, with its co-founder Thomas McNiven living in Australia, its lead designer being based out of India and its back-end engineer residing in Japan.
"We're very much chasing the sun," Fabian said.
