Wargraphs, a Gaming Startup With Only One Employee and No Outside Funding, Sells For $54 Million

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Wargraphs, a one-man-band startup behind a popular companion app for League of Legends called Porofessor, which helps players track and improve their playing stats, is getting acquired for up to [$54 million], half up front and half based on meeting certain earnings and growth targets. MOBA Networks, a company founded out of Sweden that buys, grows and runs online gaming communities (MOBA is short for "multiplayer online battle arena"), is buying the startup and its existing products. The plan is to expand them to more markets, in particular across Asia, and to build analytics for more titles. I write "startup", but that might be with the loosest interpretation of the term. There is only a single employee, the mild-mannered Jean-Nicholas, and he has also entirely bootstrapped the business on his own. But that hasn't held him back. Wargraphs currently also builds analytics for Legends of Runeterra and Teamfight Tactics, but the League of Legends business has been its biggest it by far. Porofessor has had 10 million downloads of its app on Overwolf -- which is where Porofessor was built -- and more than 1.25 million daily active users if you combine traffic both from that platform and its own direct website. The company, such as it is, has been around for some 10 years, has pretty much always been profitable with revenues of 12.3 million euros in its last fiscal year. Jean-Nicholas told TechCrunch's Ingrid Lunden that he wants to build "a game" next. "Specifically, a card game that will compete against Hearthstone, coincidentally published by Activision Blizzard," writes Lunden. "He has no plans to raise outside funding for this, but he might hire an employee or two."

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