Carry 1st

Carry1st is a South Africa-based mobile games publisher and digital commerce company serving players across Africa and the Middle East. The company publishes social games and interactive content, combining titles developed in-house, games it has acquired to relaunch at scale, and third-party titles licensed exclusively for the region. Published titles listed by the company include Mergedom: Home Design & Merge, Mancala Adventures and Mine Rescue.

Alongside publishing, Carry1st operates two commerce products. Pay1st is a monetization-as-a-service and embedded finance platform that lets game publishers accept payment through local African payment methods via an API integration, handling fraud protection, foreign exchange and cross-border operations. Carry1st Shop is a consumer marketplace where players buy diamonds, gems, points, battle passes, subscriptions and vouchers for games, dating apps and lifestyle services, with redeemable vouchers or direct top-ups. Products sold through the Shop include Call of Duty: Mobile COD Points, Free Fire Diamonds and PUBG Mobile UC.

The company also provides end-to-end publishing and marketing services to global publishers, including localized creative, user acquisition campaigns, live operations and influencer marketing. It has worked with Activision Blizzard, Garena, Riot Games and Supercell, and developed a beta platform called Play1st for discovering and reviewing web3 games.

Founding story

Carry1st was founded in 2018 by CEO Cordel Robbin-Coker, Lucy Hoffman and Tinotenda Mundangepfupfu. Robbin-Coker previously worked at Morgan Stanley and the Carlyle Group, where he led a $700 million private equity fund in sub-Saharan Africa and invested in the Nigerian fintech Paystack. Hoffman, who serves as COO, was a colleague of Robbin-Coker at Morgan Stanley and subsequently spent 11 years in South Africa.

Business model

Carry1st operates a mixed publishing and commerce model. It develops and acquires its own mobile titles, exclusively licenses third-party games for African distribution, and monetizes both categories through Pay1st, its embedded finance and monetization-as-a-service platform. It additionally runs the Carry1st Shop, an online marketplace selling virtual goods such as in-game currency, passes, subscriptions and vouchers, and sells end-to-end publishing and marketing services to global game publishers seeking distribution in Africa and the Middle East.

Revenue is generated from sales of in-game content and vouchers through the Carry1st Shop, from monetization of owned and licensed games, and from transaction-based payment processing via Pay1st for third-party publishers such as Riot Games, as well as from publishing and marketing services.

Traction

By early 2023 Carry1st reported more than 2 million monthly active users and revenue growth of 10x over the prior year. Carry1st Shop, its fastest-growing product that year, saw users and revenues rise fivefold and offered 100+ products across 120 payment methods. The first game from its CrazyHubs accelerator, The President by Mekan Games, was the most-downloaded game in the U.S. for several days in July 2022.

Latest developments

Carry1st announced a strategic investment from the Sony Innovation Fund in January 2024. Its site publishes market commentary forecasting the Africa and Middle East games market to exceed $8.5 billion with an African player base passing 406 million.