Finnish game firm PlayRaven wins $2.3 million in seed funding

HELSINKI (Reuters) - Finnish games developer PlayRaven has raised $2.3 million in seed funding, the latest in a series of venture capital investments in the Nordic country's burgeoning games industry.

The investment round illustrates a broader trend for games developers, though mostly small, to attract investment into Finland following the decline of Nokia's mobile phone business, which is being sold to Microsoft.

Rovio, which developed Angry Birds, is the most famous of Finland's games companies, but smaller players are also attracting attention from venture capital investors.

PlayRaven said on Tuesday its investors included Nordic-focused technology fund Creandum, an early backer of Spotify. Entrepreneur Jari Ovaskainen and London Venture Partners, both early investors in Finnish games company Supercell who sold a 51 percent stake to Japanese mobile operator SoftBank for $1.5 billion in October, also took part in the funding round.

Chief Executive Lasse Seppanen said the investment will help it develop a new game to follow on its first title, Spymaster, due out this spring. Spymaster is a strategy game in which a player manages a network of spies in a World War Two setting.

Seppanen said the company wants to develop more titles that were totally different from "cartoon-like" games that currently dominate the industry.

"The content offering right now is very homogenous. It's as if all the television channels were showing cartoons," he told Reuters. "We want to reach new audiences, and we think the market's underserved. Spymaster is a beginning, and we want to build on that."

(Reporting by Ritsuko Ando; Editing by David Holmes)