Sugar has closed a round of pre-seed financing to further develop its platform.

The company provides automated, data-driven finance to help game and app studios scale up, without them having to raise equity finance.

The financing round was led by Passion Capital and included participation from Velo Partners, as well as angel investors including Victoria van Lennep of Lendable.

The primary use of the funds will be for key hires and scaling the platform to support more studios in key markets. It has already provided finance to several UK studios this year and plans to build its platform and business in the UK, before expanding to Scandinavia and the US in coming years.

Chief executive Matt Frenchman said: "With this round of funding, we can focus on developing our platform, growing the team and ultimately giving studios quick and easy finance to scale up."

Founded in 2019, its primary product is SugarBoost, which is a marketing loan to scale up a studio's revenues. It also offers SugarFlow, which gives studios early access to their digital revenues, and SugarCap, which advances the studios their video games tax relief credits, which can normally take months to process.

Based on live data analysis, Sugar provides finance to a studio, which is then re-paid over time by the revenues of the game or app in question. Depending on the metrics of the game or app, Sugar's financing levels can be increased as required.

Malin Posern, partner at Passion Capital, commented: "Flexible, quick and efficient financing for games studios and apps developers makes a lot of sense - there's an opportunity here to make these ecosystems thrive and Sugar will provide the platform to help drive that innovation along with the ambition to become a world-leading financing provider."

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