UK-based business LF.Group, a free SaaS platform for gaming communities, has announced a $1m pre-seed funding round to help grow its platform.
The company aims to help gamers find teammates and get better results in online games, including the likes of League of Legends (on PC and mobile via Wild Rift), World of Warcraft and Lost Ark, with plans to expand to other games.
LF.Group also bills itself as a software toolkit that lets gaming communities host events, recruit players and organise activities.
The $1m investment was raised from Grishin Robotics, a venture capital (VC) firm based in Silicon Valley and London. It will be used to extend community support and build new features on the platform such as a news feed and AI helper that suggests the best job opportunities for players.
LF.Group first launched its LFG Discord bot with Lost Ark’s Traveling Merchants tracking function, and later partnered with various streamers and guilds in WoW, including Echo and UK-based Method.
Guilds can set up a community page and use it to search for new players to join the roster. Each guild profile also includes customisable filters to specify the community’s goals and guild type, calendar and timetable of the in-game events, highlights and accolades, current guild roster and list of open positions.
To hire new players, orgs can create a custom application form with filters and a questionnaire. Then communities receive notifications about new candidates via Discord or in-browser on LF.Group website. Chat with applicants is also available and all players’ profiles who applied to teams’ open positions are stored in one place.
“I’ve always missed the proper tool to gather new teammates I want to play with. Most of the solutions we compete with today are the in-game search bars or looking-for-group threads on forums. They are either built for instant gaming or lack the wide range of parameters for selecting new players for your team.”
Dmitriy Beseda, LF.Group
Today LF.Group has more than 50,000 gamer profiles and 200 teams on the wait list to start recruiting newcomers.
LF.Group was founded by entrepreneur Alexey Moiseenkov (who previously launched Prisma Labs and Capture Technologies), Dmitriy Beseda and Alexander Karetin (co-founders of Overgear); and Stas Kapinus (founder of eStreams).
As avid players themselves, entrepreneurs quickly settled on the idea of starting a business in the gaming industry. “Online games helped me become a stronger leader and drastically improved my decision-making. In high school, I was already among the top 200 World of Warcraft players in the post-Soviet space, and to date I have almost 9600 hours spent playing. We know firsthand how difficult it is to team up with like-minded people who can take you to the next level within your favorite game”, Alexey Moiseenkov says.
Co-founder Dmitriy Beseda said: “As a person with more than 20 years of gaming experience – I even met my wife in a game! – I’ve always missed the proper tool to gather new teammates I want to play with.
“Most of the solutions we compete with today are the in-game search bars or looking-for-group threads on forums. They are either built for instant gaming or lack the wide range of parameters for selecting new players for your team.”
The business is similar to another UK-based service – Teams.gg – which now has Apex Legends, Fortnite and Valorant on its platform.
Dom is an award-winning writer and finalist of the Esports Journalist of the Year 2023 award. He graduated from Bournemouth University with a 2:1 degree in Multi-Media Journalism in 2007.
As a long-time gamer having first picked up the NES controller in the late ’80s, he has written for a range of publications including GamesTM, Nintendo Official Magazine, industry publication MCV and others. He worked as head of content for the British Esports Federation up until February 2021, when he stepped back to work full-time on Esports News UK and offer esports consultancy and freelance services. Note: Dom still produces the British Esports newsletter on a freelance basis, so our coverage of British Esports is always kept simple – usually just covering the occasional press release – because of this conflict of interest.
