icejam, a mobile games company at the forefront of integrating big data to enhance the mobile games experience, today announced it raised $3 million (CDN) to fund future growth, continue development of its proprietary new Playable Data™ Platform and prepare its first game for market introduction. The funding round was led by Build Ventures and brings total capital raised by icejam to $3.5 million. Patrick Keefe, general partner of Build Ventures, joins icejam’s Board of Directors.

icejam has been attracting industry attention due to its unique approach to free-to-play (F2P) mobile games by integrating real-world data into the experience. Stuart Duncan, Founder & CEO of icejam and former EA studio director states: “While the traditional mobile games market is consolidating and investments are down, there remains great interest in transformative technologies that play with the boundaries of imagination and reality. Today we see this with happening with investments in AR, VR, and now Playable Data. While AR and VR might be a consumer proposition someday, Playable Data is here now … and it's great.”

icejam’s Playable Data™ Platform integrates real-time, real-world data streams into the mobile game to dramatically enhance gameplay, while solving key engagement and retention dilemmas that face the mobile games industry. Playable Data™ will be the backbone for the company’s games; the first of which is scheduled for release later this year.

The closing of this seed round will enable icejam to continue to build out the capabilities of the platform, prepare its first game for market introduction and open a new Toronto location to focus on business intelligence and marketing. According to Wayne Seifried, CMO of icejam: “icejam is aggressively hiring now in both locations. We need to grow our team of developers, marketing and business intelligence staff over the next six months as we prepare for the launch of our first game.”

About icejam

icejam™ was founded by serial entrepreneur and 3D and F2P mobile games pioneer Stu Duncan with the mission to create better mobile games using the vast landscape of big data. Established in 2014, icejam is located in Charlottetown PEI and Toronto, ON, and is poised for a breakthrough in the rapidly growing $45B global mobile games market. Stuart Duncan, founder of Bight Games, has brought multiple top-grossing, free-to-play mobile games to market, including The Simpsons: Tapped Out and Trade Nations, generating multiple multi-million dollar revenue streams and a successful exit of Bight Games to EA Mobile.

More information can be found online at www.icejam.com or follow them on Twitter (@icejamgames), Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn.

About Build Ventures

Build Ventures (http://buildventures.ca/) is based in Halifax, Nova Scotia and is focused on early stage technology companies across the Atlantic region. The company currently has $65M under management.