SuperDuperSecret Co. announced it successfully raised over $1 million in an oversubscribed pre-seed funding round. The investors include Round 13 Digital Asset Fund, Merit Circle, Polygon Ventures, Solana Foundation, LD Capital, Overwolf, Big Brain Holdings, and angel investors such as Sebastien Borget, Gabby Dizon, and Cristian Manea, among several others. The company’s launch title, Royale Chess—a 10-player, battle royale chess game—marks the first of many games across their underlying meta-game platform, focusing on multiplayer, evergreen games.
This funding round makes co-founder and CEO Jazzlyn O’Reilly the first Latina founder to raise over $1 million in venture capital funding in the gaming industry. SuperDuperSecret Co.’s CEO Jazzlyn started the company together with co-founder and CTO Mark McCubbin in early 2022. And the team’s experience ranges back to the 8-bit days, including work on critically acclaimed titles like Shadow of the Beast, Dune II, and the NBA2K series, and others.
Chess has seen an explosion in popularity in the last few years with over 600 million active players worldwide and over 65 million hours of chess watched per year on streaming sites like Twitch.
Royale Chess brings a twist to one of the world’s oldest games. Ten players face off in a blazingly fast-paced showdown, making their moves in synchronous matches against each of the other 9 players. And the game’s AI assist, which enables players to quickly make a move via a button press, is a key component, as the company seeks to make the game as approachable as it is exhilarating.
Royale Chess is expected to launch later this year – first on PC and Mac – before launching on mobile and console. And through Royale Chess and the company’s future titles, the team aims to create positive playspaces for millions of gamers worldwide and bring its fast-paced, social gameplay twists to other familiar yet traditionally underserved games.
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“It’s astonishing that the number of funded female and minority founders in the gaming space is still so small in 2023, especially considering how diverse the consumers of games are; 48% percent of gamers identify as female, for example,” she commented, “I can only hope that news like this can help encourage others who don’t as often see people like themselves represented in this space, to take the leap and build companies of their own, and to not be afraid to pursue funding to achieve their vision. It’s not just a matter of numbers; the industry needs diverse founders in order to create truly innovative content for the world’s 3 billion gamers.”
“The secret is, Mark and I are actually both pretty terrible at chess. But despite our skill level (or lack of), it’s always had its own charm, and we both had our own stories connected to it. We wanted to bring a ‘Tetris 99’ vibe to it, making it a really fun and engaging experience even for those who never thought of themselves as ‘chess players.’”
“We’re grateful to have such a strong group of investors from an early stage. Together with our team we’re able to tap into expertise spanning multiple fields from traditional gaming to the web3 space. Their belief in our vision, both short- and long-term, is a huge validation of the hard work we’ve put in to get to this point. We’re incredibly excited to be bringing Royale Chess to the public soon, but we’re even more excited to be creating new ways to play and bring people together across all of our future titles and platform.”
— Co-founder and CEO Jazzlyn O’Reilly
