Hiro Metaverse Acquisitions I S.A. looks like being the latest special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) to float on the London Stock Exchange.
Compared to the US, London has not seen many of these so-called blank cheque companies yet so investors might be unfamiliar with them but essentially the idea is that investors hand over a pile of money to a company that invests in something - the investors know not what - in a specific area of the market. Tulip bulbs, for instance, or an enterprise in the South Sea.
As such, the management team of the SPAC is crucial to attracting the money. Hiro Metaverse, whose founders include Games Workshop founder Sir Ian Livingstone, looks to fit the bill when it comes to its chosen field of life, the metaverse and everything.
Livingstone’s co-founding partners are Luke Alvarez and Cherry Freeman. All three are described as senior leaders with an established track record of entrepreneurship and investment in the video gaming, digital sports and technology sectors.
The SPAC, or blank cheque company as it is sometimes called, is sponsored by Hiro Capital, which invests in high-growth video games, e-sports, interactive streaming, gamified fitness and metaverse technology innovators.
HMAI intends to focus on targets operating in the sectors of video games, e-sports, interactive streaming, Generation Z (GenZ) social networks, connected fitness & wellness and metaverse technologies.
According to the company’s stock market release, these have a combined market size of more than US$350bn. The HMAI team believes that games and the metaverse are the next major computing platform and will constitute a large proportion of the new economy of the 2030s.
Hiro Mataverse’s stock market statement said the founding team has collectively co-founded and invested in more than US$9bn worth of companies in these sectors, from start-ups to initial public offerings (IPOs) in London and New York.
Livingstone will be the chair of the company. He co-founded Games Workshop and subsequently was executive chairman of the Tomb Raider/Lara Croft software company Eidos. Later on, he was the chair of Sumo Group, a provider of creative and development services to the video games and entertainment industries that was bought for £1bn last month by Tencent; however, Livingstone is perhaps best known as the author of the Fighting Fantasy solitaire adventure gaming books.
"We are launching Hiro Metaverse Acquisitions I SA in London because there is a tremendous video games industry here in the UK and Europe,” Livingstone said.
“This region has talented entrepreneurs and brilliant creators who produce approximately one-third of all the video games content played worldwide. Yet despite a number of successful gaming IPOs in the UK and Europe, the region still only accounts for about 3% of the industry's global public market capitalisation. With our deep experience of the rapidly evolving gaming industry and the capital from this SPAC, we are ideally placed to identify and fund a target company that is further along its growth curve and still has high-value creation potential,” he asserted.
Luke Alvarez will be the chief executive officer (CEO) of the new company. He was co-founder & CEO of Inspired Entertainment Inc, a Nasdaq listed mobile games and virtual sports technology company, and was a founding board member of The Cloud, the UK’s largest public access Wi-Fi operator. He is also a founding board member of Upskins, a video games content innovator.
"Games are now the biggest media sector worldwide and are where the next big computing platform – the Metaverse – is emerging. With almost 3 billion gamers worldwide, games technologies have expanded beyond Game Studios into Digital Assets, Creator Platforms, Web3 Worlds and even Digital Fitness and Wellness – so the opportunity for innovators is large,” Alvarez said.
“With HMAI, the sponsor founders and the Hiro fund are investing capital into bringing a high-quality, later-stage business in the UK/European Games, digital sports and metaverse space to the public market," Alvarez added.
Cherry Freeman is the founder of LoveCrafts, a company that builds social marketplaces for the crafts sector, and is a co-founder of Hiro Capital. She will be HMAI’s chief operating officer.
"At Hiro, we back experienced, entrepreneurial games and metaverse teams building innovative companies with the opportunity to become very large. This SPAC allows us to invest in later-stage companies who we can help scale up quickly. We are a disciplined investor focused on opportunities with strong growth prospects in combination with robust fundamental economics. We believe the opportunity to bring to the LSE a large private player in this space is really exciting,” she said.