Over the last year, companies that leverage game mechanics and design into traditionally non-game contexts have raised nearly $239M across 67 deals. Occupying the space broadly referred to as gamification, these venture-backed startups span a wide variety of applications ranging from workforce management and recruiting (Hoopla Software, True Office, Zao) to sales and marketing (LevelEleven, Influitive) to pure-play gamification vendors (Badgeville, Big Door, Gigya).
But like other buzzwords before it like hyperlocal and location-based services, is investor buzz around the gamification concept starting to wear off?
On a year-over-year basis, venture funding to gamification-related companies has dropped 17% while deal activity has dipped 14%, as shown in the chart below. While Q2’12 saw a jump in funding behind follow-on deals to the likes of Badgeville, Gigya and SessionM, over 77% of deals in the past year have come at the Seed or Series A stages.
Not shown in the decline in deals and dollars to the gamification space as a whole is the notable funding growth to the gamified health sub-category. In fact, YoY funding to gamified health startups has jumped over 136%. Just last quarter, over $78M went to digital health companies applying gamification techniques such as Keas (Atlas Venture & Ignition Partners) and NEA-backed Welltok while in the last year $145M has gone to health-related gamification companies as shown below. Though that’s only a small slice of the $1.5B in funding to the digital health industry, it’s nearly 61% of aggregate funding to gamification overall.
