Candivore has raised $12 million to fund growth for the company’s games such as Match Masters, a mobile match-3 puzzle game.

The mobile game combines the well-known match-3 gameplay with a competitive player-versus-player twist. The title has more than a million monthly active users who play more than five million daily matches. Match-3 games like Candy Crush Saga are the most prominent subgenre in the U.S. iPhone game market, accounting for 21% of the market’s revenue, according to mobile game insight and analytics firm GameRefinery.

The Tel Aviv-based studio has 25 people, and the funding team came from Funtomic, which operated the Kizi flash game portal, started in 2009. Amsterdam-based Azerion acquired Funtomic in 2017, but it discontinued the Match Masters game. The founders of Candivore believed in the potential of Match Masters and they formed a new company and bought it back. Then they launched the game under Candivore in 2018.

The company has consistently introduced new features and content for the past two years, including during the 2020 pandemic, constantly giving players more to discover.

The latest update had a total of 25 boosters as well as hundreds of game modes, teams, challenges, and tournaments — all ways to interact with the game and other players. Match Masters lets people play against each other or team up with them anywhere in the world.

Most revenues come from in-app purchases; players buy items that help them play better and progress faster. Players who don’t usually pay also contribute to the game’s revenue by watching rewarded video ads.

Above: Match Masters has a PvP element.

Image Credit: Candivore

Candivore’s mission is to create positive experiences through gaming — social, intellectual, and entertaining. The company doesn’t plan to start new projects in 2021 or grow the team significantly for now.

“We want to stay focused in order to get Match Masters as far and as big as possible,” said CEO Gal Goldstein, in a statement.

Tel Aviv-based venture capital firm VGames and its founder Eitan Reisel led the round, which will be used to fuel user acquisition.

Besides Goldstein, the founders include Ehud Rosenberg (development and product lead), Zur Tamam (art lead), Sahar Azran (backend lead), Tom Amel (R&D), and Alon Shkedi (client lead).