May 21, 2020

Texan video games veteran switched HQ to Scotland and sealed £500,000 investment Kristan Rivers' AdInMo signs up DeltaDNA founder as it wins backing from Techstart Ventures Share Sign up to FREE email alerts from businessInsider - Daily Subscribe When you subscribe we will use the information you provide to send you these newsletters. Sometimes they’ll include recommendations for other related newsletters or services we offer. Our Privacy Notice explains more about how we use your data, and your rights. You can unsubscribe at any time. Thank you for subscribingSee our privacy notice Invalid Email Video games tech firm AdInMo has completed a $500,000 seed investment round led by Techstart Ventures after its Texan founder moved the business to Edinburgh. Gaming veteran Kristan Rivers set up AdInMo in 2017 in his home city of Austin but his wife is Scottish and he opted to switch headquarters across the Atlantic last November. Now, with the new financial backing, he has appointed DeltaDNA co-founder Chris Wright as chief technology officer. Wright was CTO of DeltaDNA until the Edinburgh firm's takeover last year by US giant Unity Technologies, for whom he remains a consultant. Read More Advertising can be integrated via tokens as in this coin pusher game Rivers is a University of Texas engineering graduate who began his career with Apple in 1993 and has worked for games developers all over the world, including a stint in Glasgow. He said: "I'm a native Texan and have the tattoos to prove it - originally from Austin, Texas, but have now spent more than half my life outside the US. My wife is from Scotland, and one of my two teenage daughters was born here, the other born in Seoul, Korea when we were living there. "We lived in Asia for about 14 years, moving from Seoul to Beijing to Singapore, and decided to come back to the West a few years ago when our oldest was reaching high school age." Edinburgh's growing reputation as a hotbed for tech firms helped convince Rivers to make the leap from Austin to Auld Reekie. He said: "Although AdInMo started in Austin, we knew that Austin wouldn't be the long-term base of operations. Austin is a great place, it's my hometown, but it is not the centre of the world for either advertising or games, the two markets AdInMo straddles. "It made perfect sense to relocate AdInMo to Scotland, given the great ecosystem of games and tech companies here, and local universities that are graduating great software development and big data talent." Techstart Ventures previously invested in Dundee company ChilliConnect, which was bought last September by Unity Technologies. ChilliConnect enables cloud-based games to play seamlessly and provides real-time analytics for developers. Rivers said: "The support of Scottish Enterprise has been amazing throughout the process of relocation, and our lead investors Techstart have also provided a huge amount of knowledge and insight for us on doing business within Scotland and the UK." The Texan reckons AdInMo's software can revolutionise the gaming industry. By building advertising into the game, and not just as an annoying pop-up window or banner, he says ads can reach targets more effectively because they can't be closed down and are less likely to be ignored. AdInMo CTO Chris Wright He added: “The in-game ad model is currently broken for all stakeholders. Advertisers can only run direct response campaigns, developers only get paid if a player clicks an ad and leaves their game, and players have to put up with constant disruptions. “AdInMo’s dynamic in-game ad platform solves all of this, by seamlessly integrating non-intrusive ads into gameplay which are impossible to skip, block or ignore, and as a result, AdInMo ad units deliver four times higher brand recall compared with video ads.” Read More