Internet Game - The Game Room For Remote Teams

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Company & Team Introduction

Internet Game is a virtual game room designed to bring remote teams together, boost employee productivity, and help teams bond in a light-hearted environment where everyone can have fun and get to know each other. The colleagues a person works with are central to the work environment of any job. You can be working a job you love, but conflict between co-workers can still be detrimental to your workplace experience. The duo of Jordan Lejuwaan and Krish Jagidar identified this remote work disconnect occurring in early 2021, and they teamed up to solve it. Internet Game’s founding team have impressive resumes; Lejuwaan is a serial entrepreneur (Co-founder of RaveNectar, Futurism acq. by Singularity University, Gravity Products, ZeroSpace), and Krish Jagidar is a tenured venture Capitalist, spending over eight years at NYC-based firm Brand New Matters. Lejuwaan now runs the company as CEO, and Jagidar is president. The company is headquartered in New York City, New York, and has grown its team to ~18 employees.

Product Overview

With the rapid shift to remote-based teams over the past ~4 years, company morale is top of mind for any founder/executive. The company offers a variety of different genres, ranging from competitive, team-building, and social icebreaker games. Each game was built from the ground up with employee inclusion in mind. Games are designed with simple-to-follow rules and easy controls, with all games only requiring arrow keys and the space bar to play. All employees need to participate is a stable internet connection and a computer/laptop. To set up your company’s “community” you simply pick a team name and logo, then set a time, date, and duration for your “game night” and add your list of employees to invite; Internet Game will handle the rest!

Total Addressable Market

Companies allocate an insane amount of money each year in an attempt to bring their teams closer together and increase employee morale. The total addressable market for the team building market was estimated to be as large as ~3.3B in 2022. It is slated to balloon to ~9.9B in 2030 as remote work continues its rise to prominence, compounding at a staggering 20.16% through the period. Couple this with the over 3B people across the globe who actively play video games, and the market opportunity for Internet Game is clear.

Business Model & The Numbers

Internet Game is still in beta mode currently, where it is free to play, no matter the size of your team. In 2024, the company plans to migrate to a freemium subscription-based business model where the platform is free for teams of under 10 employees. After teams reach the 10-member threshold, companies will be charged a monthly fee calculated based on the number of seats needed. The company has set a goal to scale from 0 to 400K in monthly recurring revenue by the end of 2024.

Traction

Distributed work and remote-based teams have exploded over the past ~5 years since the COVID-19 pandemic shifted the business world online. This shift to remote work brought a new set of challenges to companies: over 50% of employees feel isolated, lonely, and disconnected from their company culture. Employees fail to build strong relationships with co-workers and don’t experience any fun or joy in their work environment, negatively affecting their mood and productivity. With this new set of problems that have stemmed from the shift to remote work, companies have been left scrambling to look for a low-cost, enjoyable solution to building a remote team. There has also been an increase in studies showing the struggles that come with distributed work and the use of gaming as an effective way to combat loneliness and workplace disconnect, which helps solidify Internet Games’ value proposition. A recent study by BYU showed that collaborative gaming increased employees’ subsequent work productivity by up to 20%. Associate BYU professor Greg Anderson had this to say about the results: “To see that large of a jump - especially for the amount of time they played - was a little shocking.” before joking about the insane amounts of money that remote-based companies are throwing at the problem, stating “I’m thinking, just go buy an Xbox.”.

Competitors

The direct competitive landscape for Internet Game is highly favourable, with their gaming-focused approach to virtual team building being much different than most trying to tackle this issue. Similar startups are trying to solve this problem but with a more business-focused approach like gather.town, creating a virtual headquarters for any company where they can book meetings, have their own digital avatar, walk up to other employees for a quick chat, host virtual conferences, etc. Gather is free for teams under 10 employees, after which it is $7/seat/month. The company is backed by YC and has deep pockets, most recently raising a 50M series B, valuing the company at over 700M in late 2021. Forbes estimated the company’s revenue for 2021 to be ~10M.

Funding

Internet Game has only raised a single round of funding, which was a star-studded 7M seed round with some of the top crypto-focused VC firms and angel investors. Some of Internet Game’s backers include Dragonfly Capital, Uniswap Ventures, ParaFi Capital, Collab+Currency, and Milk Road, in addition to notable angel investors within the gaming vertical such as Zedd (Cofounder of Magic Eden) and Rus Yusupov (Cofounder of HQ Trivia).