Niantic, the company behind the hit location-based mobile game Pokémon GO, have closed a $190.6 million Series C financing round, bringing the company’s overall funding to more than $415 million to date.

As first reported by Tech Crunch, documents filed with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission revealed the company has secured its Series C on December 20th, 2018, amounting to a total of $190,552,365.

A Wall Street Journal report contended shortly before the deal was sealed that investors would include IVP, aXiomatic Gaming and Samsung. Other investors include Founders Fund, Spark Capital and Alsop Louie Partners; a total of 26 investors took part.

Niantic’s previous financing round netted the studio an impressive $200 million back in November 2017, led by Spark Capital in participation with Founders Fund, Meritech, Javelin Venture Capital, You & Mr. Jones and Chinese Internet technology company NetEase, Inc.

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While the company’s next foray into mobile gaming will be Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, another Pokémon GO-style location-based game set in the world of Harry Potter, what really has us excited is the company’s Real World Platform, a set of tools created for third-party developers that’s said to blend machine learning and computer vision.

With Niantic Real World, developers will be able to create their own useful and realistic AR experiences on mobile devices— something more akin to what you’d expect Pokémon GO to be, i.e. 3D virtual characters placed into the physical world, replete with depth mapping and multiplayer accessibility.

Niantic has been mum on the prospect of developing its games for AR headsets, hypothetical or otherwise. With the latest financing round though, the company’s AR pioneering spirit will surely live on as more attainable headset offerings come to the consumer market.

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Scott Hayden
Well before the first modern XR products hit the market, Scott recognized the potential of the technology and set out to understand and document its growth. He has been professionally reporting on the space for nearly a decade as Editor at Road to VR, authoring more than 4,000 articles on the topic. Scott brings that seasoned insight to his reporting from major industry events across the globe.
  • Steve

    I’m surprised there are still some people playing this. I’m also surprised that with the success of the current version that they need to raise money.

  • Good for them, even if I believe that Pokemon Go’s success has been one of a kind

  • I agree with Steve: it’s kind of surprising (and a bit worrying, actually) that despite the huge success of Pokemon Go they still need to raise money… is their cash flow completely out of control? Otherwise it wouldn’t make sense to bring in 26 (!!) new investors who will obviously take away some decisional power/control from existing stakeholders and add additional pressure on future results and expectations.

  • WyrdestGeek

    I listen to a podcast where android app developers at Google talk about stuff that Google is working on for the Android framework.

    Sometimes they cover AR. From hearing them talk about it, this stuff is still very hard to do properly on a cell phone, especially since regular phones don’t have a depth camera.

    Niantic. *sigh*. Niantic, IMHO, is a company that can just *barely* manage to figuratively tie their shoes. I have 0 confidence in them coming out with an AR toolkit.

    As always, I will be happy to have my pessimism proved false.