One of the most common criticisms of Berlin startups is that they are all mouth – plenty of promise but not enough quantifiable success. Yet there are a few which go some way to living up to the hype, and HitFox is one. The company builds and acquires businesses in the realm of game distribution with its current trio of subsidiaries focusing on game marketing and discovery.
And having tripled its workforce to 75 in 2012, HitFox has announced its expansion to France and the US with the establishment of local offices just weeks after a similar move in South Korea.
The company’s marketing blurb makes for impressive reading: ad2games, the online game marketing offshoot, has tripled its monthly revenue since its acquisition from Gameforge ten months ago while HitFox as a whole works with 160 game publishers including Electronic Arts and King.com. Within the next year, the company plans to double the existing workforce while also predicting – and this, as always, should be taken with a pinch of salt – that its revenue will increase five-fold in the same period.
Some of that growth will be led by its other two current subsidiaries – mobile game marketing subsidiary AppLift, which launched in August, and mobile game discovery app Game Finder – but there are also plans to buy or co-found up to two additional companies in 2013.
For now, HitFox will have to be happy with the appointment of Nicole DeMeo, formerly of Scoreloop and Peak games, in San Francisco, and Jean-Philippe Decka, co-founder of ExMachina and most recently global venture development manager at Rocket Internet, in Paris.
HitFox was yet another startup to emerge out of the core group of entrepreneurs active in Berlin over the past decade. It was founded in 2011 by current CEO Jan Beckers, Dr. Hanno Fichtner, Tim Koschella and Ruben Haas together with Team Europe Ventures. Subsequent investors include HV Holtzbrinck Ventures, Tengelmann Ventures, Hasso Plattner Ventures, Kite Ventures and Digital Pioneers.
Jan told Silicon Allee: “We have built a very entrepreneurial team and structure, which is a big success factor in the fast-changing game distribution market. Additionally, our startups profit a lot from the synergies within our structure – a lot of the advertisers and affiliates of ad2games now also work with AppLift and integrated their games into our GameFinder.”