COPENHAGEN: Danish-owned PlayLab is a mobile games company based in and focusing on Southeast Asia as future growth market, with a global success landed with their ‘Juice Cubes’. As their third developed game became their break-through they quickly grew from a team of 20 people to over 100 within a short period of time.
CEO and co-founder Jakob Lykkegaard Pedersen held a presentation at the Techsauce start-up summit earlier this year and ScandAsia got a chance to get insights into the gaming industry and how PlayLab has grown into a success and continues expanding, striving to create the best games for iOS and Android devices along with Facebook.
Jakob started Playlab along with Danish co-founder Thomas Andreasen and a third Dane, their CFO Kasper Kragelund has also invested into the company. Legally based in Hong Kong they have games labs in Bangkok and Manila. Anino Games (Manila) that Playlab bought up is their fifth games team that focuses on developing Playlab’s casino slots games further. The games company has also received a $5 million investment from Monk’s Hill Venture in one of the largest games VC deals in Southeast Asia to date.
PlayLab was basically born out of Jakob’s initial intention to move to Asia, first aiming at Japan, but ended up instead in Thailand where there was no teach start-up or anything back then.
“I didn’t really feel like the lifestyle was fully there,” he comments on Japan, and randomly came by Thailand that he could live here and build up his business. “There was no one really to communicate with, but I liked the country and the lifestyle enough.”
His interest in Asia was also based on the business potential.“I could see that Europe and the US felt were stagnant. I didn’t feel that things were going as fast and I was impressed by the heavy growth that was happening in Asia in general and that was what attracted me.”
