Haste Arcade Raises $1.5M in Oversubscribed Fundraising Round

Haste Arcade has just closed its $1.5 million seed round, far exceeding its $1 million goal.

We've officially closed an oversubscribed $1MM seed round of financing, securing $1.5MM, Haste Arcade revealed Wednesday.

“We were originally seeking $1MM to lay a good solid foundation for the product/vision and then have some working capital to start testing our assumptions around product/market fit, specifically with marketing outside the ‘crypto’ community,” said Dan Wagner, the co-founder of Haste Arcade.

“After pitching the concept to a handful of investors, it became obvious that we weren’t the only ones thinking ILP™ Gaming could potentially become a ‘thing.’ We stopped pitching a couple of months ago but due to word of mouth and interest from other investors we were able to secure an additional $500K on top of the original goal bringing the total to $1.5MM,” he added.

Gambling911.com's Chris Costigan tests the Haste Arcade games at first ever pop-up Bitcoin arcade (CoinGeek Bitcade)

Haste Arcade is a developer SDK and player site with ILP Games™.  ILP™, or Instant Leaderboard Payout™, which enable players globally to earn real-time, peer-to-peer rewards for simply placing on a game's leaderboard. Social gaming has been extremely popular for well over a decade now (see Zynga and remember Farmville?). 

But Haste Arcade draws from an even more lucrative sector of gaming, eSports. In 2018, video games generated US$131 billion, with eSports a quickly growing vertical within that market as revenues topped US$1 billion for the first time. But it's more than just current revenues and bottom-line figures that are getting investors excited, the potential for the sector is staggering.

Haste, Inc was only founded in 2021 and has already seen over 500,000 gameplays.

Haste Arcade utilizes the BSV Blockchain, which has proven especially beneficial for those in the gaming sector.

It is indeed the gaming aspect that has helped to boost investor confidence.

“First and foremost, the idea; its novel, it’s new, and it’s easy to understand," Wagner says of his product's appeal.  "Get on the leaderboard. Get paid. It’s not rocket science by any means and at the same rate, it’s not hard to imagine something like ILP™ Gaming catching on and taking off. 

“Secondly, the market. Online gaming is absolutely massive and even if you’re only able to capture a small fraction of the gamers in the world, you can build a business with millions or hundreds of millions of users.

“And finally, our team. It’s not our first rodeo, meaning, we’ve raised capital before and we’ve shown what it takes to build a business. Many don’t know this, but the four co-founders of Haste, Inc. have been working together for basically seven years at this point. We move fast, are great at failing, iterating, pivoting, and quite frankly just getting stuff done and keeping the ball rolling. 

“Add in the rest of the folks we’ve brought on and our core team of 8 forms a solid foundation. When you realize the core team’s skill set and experience, you realize that in a lot of ways, it’s not your average startup. Since we started building beta, everything has been done first class. If we are right, Haste Arcade has uncovered an entirely new category in gaming, and there is most likely some money to be made from being the market leader for something like that,” said Wagner.

Francisco Ramos tries his hand at the Miami CoinGeek Bitcade popup

The lead investor in the round was Jonathan Cogley, the CEO of Logic Boost Labs. Cogley has a long and successful history in the cybersecurity field and recently sold his cybersecurity company Thycotic for $1.4 billion.

- Aaron Goldstein, Gambling911.com