City games being developed in Thailand, Japan, and UAE
ROMANIA-BASED startup Questo, that brought gamification to the tours and activities space two years ago, has secured a new round of funding totalling US$1.5 million and is ready to double the size of its footprint and to expand its list of partners in Asia.
“We concluded our first investment in Questo less than a year ago and are very happy to follow up with a substantial commitment. The high in-app engagement, the global scalability, and the incredible traction even in times of the pandemic made the investment decision quite self-evident,” says Cristian Munteanu, managing partner at Early Game Ventures which led this recent round of funding.
“In 2020, Questo developed the organisational, partnerships, and platform infrastructure which will allow them to have exponential growth when tourism will start recovering. We kept the same high confidence in Alex and his team that they are able to accomplish this growth,” says Vlad Panait, managing partner at Sparking Capital.
Questo offers city exploration games that enable tourists and locals to discover and learn about a city on their own, guided by a mobile app. “While they resemble tours, they act more like real-world adventure games, a new form of urban entertainment. The players explore cities by solving challenges and riddles based on their immediate surroundings, unlocking new places and their stories”, it said in a release.
“Each quest has a unique theme and role-playing mission, with new ones being launched every week. They’re based on historical facts, local legends, books or movies, and take players around roughly 15 locations, the average duration being two hours.”
With this new injection of funds, Questo aims to get to 200 cities by the end of the year and is looking for partners that want Questo to create new and unique products for them.
“We are currently working with Destination Asia, JTB, and Arabian Adventures to create city games in Thailand, Japan, and UAE. We welcome other partners who want us to help them create city games and grow their supply with unique new products,” said its founder and CEO Alex Govoreanu (pictured).
The funds will also be used to grow their team from the current 14 to 25, and to build its brand globally, said Govoreanu.
With gaming popularity high in Asia, it would seem the right decision for Questo to target the region. Indeed, Questo has recently added new city games in Singapore, Thailand (Bangkok), Japan (Tokyo, Osaka, Tokushima), UAE(Dubai) and Turkey (Istanbul). In the next few days, its app will be available in Japanese and more Asian languages will follow as it grows in Asia, said Govoreanu.
Questo has been busy during the pandemic year, even as it acknowledged the challenges.
“We depend on people getting out of their homes and exploring cities so Covid was a big challenge for us. But we focused on riding the storm, improving our product, growing our team, and making Questo widely available,” said Govoreanu.
Three things it focused energies on in the past year were growing the number of cities in which it operates – it was able to ramp up the number from 40 to 100 cities; working with business creators to help them create city games of their own that are adapted to the pandemic; and improving its platform to make “the creating of new city games even easier than before”.
“The fact that we managed to raise our second round of funding in seven months during a pandemic reinforces the fact that we are going in the right direction and can change the way people explore cities,” confirmed Govoreanu.
And how does it see the path for the tours and activities segment through and past this pandemic?
“The pandemic has brought the segment to a standstill and lots of tour operators and tour guides suffered because of this. To recover, they have to adapt to the new reality: that people will avoid crowds for a while and look for socially distant activities, self-guided activities like what Questo provides,” said Govoreanu.
“We welcome travel businesses to join our platform and create these custom self-guided experiences for their customers,” he added.
“People spend most of their lives in cities. Our mission is to enable them to fully enjoy every visible or unknown layer of the city, no matter if they’re travellers or locals. Questo uses storytelling and game design to teleport people to a fantasy story in their city, intertwining fiction with reality. Currently, our primary focus is on exploration games, but the options are endless,” said Govoreanu.
