Ramen VR, developers of the popular VR MMO Zenith: The Last City, raised $35 million as part of a recently-closed Series B funding round.
This follows on from a successful launch for Zenith in late January across Quest, PC VR and PSVR platforms. Despite Beat Saber’s continued dominance hampering it’s peak position on the PlayStation store, Zenith rocketed to the number one top selling game on all other platforms, including Steam (for all games, not just VR titles), Rift and Quest.
This resulting funding round was led by Anthos and Dune, along with others. Ramen VR says the funding “will be used to double the size of the studio as it transforms Zenith into a gaming super-app containing multiple worlds and gameplay experiences across VR, desktop, and mobile.” The studio is currently hiring for eleven positions, which you can view here.
Ramen VR says that “players explore Zenith’s massive JRPG-inspired world for almost 2 hours a day on Oculus Quest, Oculus Rift, PlayStation VR, and standalone VR devices.” While not particularly specific — it’s unclear whether this is the average playtime of all players, or a statistic taken from a more specific portion of data– it’s nonetheless impressive and the launch numbers corroborate the game’s immense popularity. Ramen also claims to have “the world’s largest company-run VR Discord” with 125,000 users.
Andy Tsen, co-founder and CEO of Ramen VR, said the studio was pleased with Zenith’s reception post-launch. “We’re already profitable but now we want to take the game to the next level, building massive interconnected gaming worlds for all to explore,” he said, in a prepared statement. He says the funding will help “grow the team” and allow them to “build out [their] vision” for the game.
This vision includes new classes (such as the already-announced Cyber Ninja stealth class), plus new quests and dungeons. Content has already arrived post-launch as well, featuring improved and new quests and new armor sets.
You can read our full review of Zenith here.
