Questo, the platform for city exploration games, has raised €300,000 in funding. The round was led by Sparking Capital with participation from Early Game Ventures. The funding will help Questo’s international expansion.
Questo helps travellers experience destinations by sending them on a ‘quest’ that involves tracking down clues as they discover interesting spots within a city. Today, the platform is available in 70 cities worldwide, and it’s growing rapidly.
The funding will be used to continue Questo’s partnerships with international tour operators and storytellers, and to further improve the technology to ensure a fun and equally safe city exploration experience for its users. Questo aims to become available in 100 cities by the end of 2020.
Its key markets of interest are primarily within the EU, where Questo has its largest user base. However, co-founder and CEO, Alex Govoreanu has stated plans to test new markets such as the USA, Australia and South-east Asia within the next 12 months.
“2020 has been a great year for building. In the first half of the year, we doubled our number of available quests to play, and we aim to double this again by the end of the year. In terms of users, we’re starting to see more and more people playing, and our numbers for June 2020 are similar to those from June 2019. It’s not an ideal scenario, but we’re happy to see that our users prefer Questo because we allow them to explore privately by avoiding large groups and crowded places,” said Govoreanu.
Questo is also marketing itself as a solution for tour operators in a post-COVID world. Gamified tours are safe to explore with, don’t require assistance from a guide, and can be played privately, making social distancing easy to maintain. The routes of the quests are also designed to help users discover less popular, typically more crowded places.
“We are happy to announce a new investment in a talented founding team and an innovative product, which challenges the status-quo of the classic city travelling via a self-guided tour… responding to the needs of having an engaging, immersive, private and safe city exploration experience,” said Vlad Panait, co-founder and general partner, Sparking Capital.
