It’s lights out at Lightneer as the studio officially announces closure

• The company had succeeded in raising $7.8 million in investment
• It’s debut educational game was canned in soft launch and a switch to hypercasual followed

Stay Informed

After rumours and a silence it appears that the heavily-backed Finnish games developer Lightneer has indeed closed its doors for good.

Henri Lindman, the company’s chairman and CEO took to LinkedIn to share his parting words and a distinctly homemade goodbye image (pictured above).

All star-backing

Previously Lightneer was the subject of some major investment with star backing in the shape of Rovio ‘Mighty Eagle Peter’ Vesterbacka as its their ‘brand breaker’ and company evangelist, with former Mattel and Sega of America CEO Tom Kalinske and Games Workshop co-founder Ian Livingstone as advisors.

The board also includes Marcus du Sautoy, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford, and Visiting Professor of Practice Pasi Sahlberg from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education.

The company went on to raise €2.8 million ($3.16 million) in funding in a financing round led by venture capital funds GSV Acceleration, which invested €1.8 million ($2.03 million), and IPR VC, which gave €1 million ($1.13 million) to the studio.

Total investment in Lightneer circa September 2016 stood at €3.5 million ($3.94 million).

And there’s more…

The company then closed $5 million in seed funding round to prepare for the global launch of its first game Big Bang Legends in August 2017.

This funding round was again led by GSV Acceleration, with additional funding provided by IPR VC, Brighteye VC, and Reach Capital.

This brought Lightneer’s total funds to $7.8 million.

PocketGamer.biz wrote at the time: “The money will be used to continued development of the studio’s invisible-learning platform which will debut with the launch of Big Bang Legends. The game is due to launch worldwide in January 2018, with marketing efforts focused on the US and UK”

However, all did not go well and following the departure of Lauri Jarvilehto as CEO (who said at the time that he’d “never been driven enough by things like business growth or KPIs”) and the arrival of former EA and PopCap exec Mark Cochrane as its new CEO, the game was canned and removed from app stores on May 25th 2018. It had been in soft launch since November 2016.

“Despite the positive feedback and support from players and partners around the world, it was proving hard to reach the quality standards set by the Lightneer team,” read a statement at the time.

Following the move the company pivoted away from education to hypercasual games with the support of Voodoo.

And there’s no more…

Today, writing on LinkedIn Henri Lindman, the company’s chairman and CEO wrote: “Some of you might have already heard/read about this, but Lightneer is officially no more. Today we’ll have a small farewell gathering with the team to celebrate the years we had together.

“I won’t go into details in this post but instead want to focus on sharing my gratitude for everyone who was part of this amazing journey.”

Namechecked collegues and investors include Niklas Hed, Tanu-Matti Tuominen, Timo Argillander, Benoit Wirz, Michael Cohn and Teemu Halminen.

Lindman signs off: “While companies come and go, it’s the people who stick around and we were really fortunate to work with the amazing people from Voodoo, Supersonic from Unity and other amazing partners for years. You know who you are.

“In Finnish an “entrepreneur” is literally called “the one who tries”. So… Let’s try again.”