Today we are excited to announce our investment in Rec Room, an online universe where people can play and create games with their friends.
We first met Nick Fajt and the founding Rec Room team in 2016 when they were working together at Microsoft. Since then, we have been closely following the growth of Rec Room, and we have been incredibly impressed with the consistency of their vision and the quality of their execution.
Rec Room’s mission is to build a social world to hang out and create new memories and experiences with friends. Early on, Nick and his team observed that social networks like Instagram and Snapchat were built around sharing past memories, but next-generation platforms like TikTok focused on building tools for users to create new memories and share them with the world.
Rec Room is building a place for people to create new experiences in the context of gaming and community activities, and they are off to an incredible start with more than 10M players and 1M creators on their platform today. They have done this by building a fun and welcoming community, offering easy-to-use content creation tools, and making it easy for players to play with one another across devices and platforms.
We are reaching a tipping point in software development as the “maker generation” searches for tools to unleash their creativity. In Rec Room, creators have built millions of rooms, where friends can congregate to play a space adventure game together, visit the Venice canals, attend a live game show, or throw pizza parties at a lake house.
This year, we have seen the acceleration of technology trends that forced everyone to create community through digital connections and Rec Room does that better than anyone else. The company also sits squarely at the center of our investment themes in online communities and low-code platforms.
We are thrilled to back this innovative team and be joining the Rec Room team on their journey! (If you would like to join us in Rec Room as well, download it here)