IQ Capital Makes First Investment in ShortFuze

IQ Capital Fund is pleased to announce that it has made its first investment in a deal co-led with CREATE Partners alongside a number of experienced business angel investors. The £1 million funding will be used by ShortFuze to accelerate the commercial launch and adoption of ShortFuze’s Machinima based, movie making application – Moviestorm™.
ShortFuze is focused in the electronic game design market and has previously done work in PC, console and mobile game production. It was founded by Matt Kelland and David Lloyd in 2003 after they sold their mobile game company nGame to Mforma Inc. ShortFuze’s Moviestorm™ is the product that this funding will be helping to bring to market. It is the first dedicated movie-making tool based on Machinima, an emerging new media form that uses a videogame engine to produce 3D animation quickly, cheaply, and easily. Moviestorm™ is different to games engines which concentrate on action. Moviestorm™ focuses on dramatic and realistic performance, using expression to convey emotion; this enables the user to make films with real subtlety and richness in animation.
Commenting on the investment, Max Bautin, Partner at IQ Capital, said: “Moviestorm™ provides users of all descriptions with the opportunity to make high quality animated films that previously were the preserve of the large movie studio. Where traditional animation engines challenge the user and require a great degree of skill and experience, Movietstorm™ is easy to use and flexible, enabling the budding director to create and produce their own film from their PC “.
“This is the first investment the IQ Capital Fund has made and we are pleased to co-lead it with our long standing investment partner CREATE. In line with IQC’s investment strategy the round also included a number of sector experienced ‘IQ’ business angels, led by a well-known Cambridge entrepreneur Jack Lang, who will not only invest in this funding round but will also strongly support the business development. We are actively working on a number of other investment opportunities and look forward to announcing other investments in the next few months”.
Boyd Mulvey of Create Partners added: “We first invested in ShortFuze a year ago as part of the seed funding round and are pleased to see how much progress the company has made in this time. Movietstorm™ beta test version is already available for test and we anticipate the company will be in position to launch the first commercial version in the summer of 2007. I am pleased to be joining the board as part of this significant funding round alongside IQ Capital”.
“It is a great endorsement for the company and our technology” said David Bailey, CEO of ShortFuze. “We are delighted with our successful fund raising, our investors have been very supportive of our aspirations and the capital that they have provided will be used to accelerate the development of our technology and speed our progress to market, through the strengthening of our product development team and to increase our business development activities. Having such high caliber investment partners on board underlines how far we have come since our seed round of funding”.