Epic Edges Capital, an investment firm based in Dubai, has put $1 million into Rise of Fearless, a mobile battle royale game owned by Africans, using a Simple Agreement for Future Equity (SAFE). The money is meant to widen the game's audience and turn it into a gaming franchise that can sustain itself commercially, and the Rise of Fearless team has 12 months to prove it can grow.
The new funds will cover building the game, the supporting infrastructure, marketing and growing a player community, and the project will also bring on experienced developers and executives from the global gaming industry.
Investors are paying growing attention to African gaming, fuelled by a rising number of players and a taste for locally made games. According to research from Carry1st, a gaming tech startup, and the research firm Newzoo, the continent's gaming market is expected to earn $1.98 billion in 2026, with mobile titles accounting for close to 82% of that figure.
What is Rise of Fearless?
Rise of Fearless was released in 2025 as a battle royale that costs nothing to play, built around Ethiopia's 1896 Battle of Adwa. Players choose their avatars and weapons, then compete to survive in peer-to-peer matches. According to Kanessa Muluneh, who created it, it has been downloaded more than 15,000 times in total, and it can be found on Google Play Store and the App Store.
In her view, the funding signals a move away from testing out a gaming product and towards running a business that can take on international rivals.
“Getting a game out the door is really not the hardest part,” she said in an October 27 conversation. “But growing it and holding its own against everything else on offer is definitely something I did not expect to be so difficult.”
The 100,000-user target for Rise of Fearless
As a condition of the funding agreement, Rise of Fearless has twelve months to meet set performance targets, according to Muluneh. These include:
- drawing in 100,000 active users;
- delivering major technical upgrades to the game.
Neither the company's valuation nor the exact terms on which Epic Edges will take its equity stake were made public.
That target is a big jump from where the game stands today. Muluneh said Rise of Fearless has been downloaded more than 15,000 times in total, and its biggest player communities are found in Nigeria, Ethiopia, and South Africa. To reach the goal, the team must win far more users and also keep them playing actively.
Muluneh is wagering that expertise from abroad and a bigger marketing drive will power expansion, as investors take a growing look at the continent's video game industry.
“I did 15,000 [game downloads] by myself,” she said. “If I can do that by myself, then no doubt that with a strong team and strong marketing plan we can easily get 100,000 in Africa.”
The Rise of Fearless agreement is also a sign of increasing investor enthusiasm for gaming businesses and storytelling based in Africa, although developers still struggle to turn player engagement into lasting income.
Vatar, the early-stage company that built Lagos Life, a Nigerian browser game that took off quickly online, secured $500,000 from angel investors last October, valuing it at $10 million. The round closed a mere seven days after the game went live. Local outlet Condia reports that the firm is now seeking a further $2.5 million in an early-stage round, which would put its valuation at $15 million.
Bankrolling a video game dream
According to Muluneh, most of the money behind Rise of Fearless's creation has come out of her own pocket. In conversation with TechCabal, she put her spending on building and marketing the game at roughly $2.8 million, adding that it currently makes money only through advertising.
“Because I had to get it audited for the investment, I had to count how much money I basically spent on a monthly, yearly basis on this game, and we came close to $2.8 million,” she said. “And that’s not just money for the development; there’s also money for the marketing that I spent, for all the travelling to attend events, management team, social media, [and] community management. In hindsight, it wasn’t necessary. I didn’t have to spend that much. But this is the price you pay if you go in without a plan, I guess.”
Muluneh explained that part of that spending stemmed from errors made early on, among them switching development teams and not securing ownership of some of the game's assets.
This self-funding comes after a previous financing deal that never turned into capital the team could use. In September 2025, Muluneh had told the publication Entrepreneur MENA that Rise of Fearless had obtained $700,000 from a private investor who was not named.
She stated back then that the money had not yet been spent, describing the wait as a deliberate and strategic decision about timing. Once it is used, a quarter will be put into developing the game, while the other three-quarters is earmarked for promotion: “What’s strategic about our approach is that we haven’t deployed these funds yet – we’re being intentional about timing. When we do, 25% will go toward game development and the remaining 75% toward marketing.”
She said, though, that the money was never put to use, and that the deal was eventually dropped following disputes over its terms.
Muluneh said she opted to keep bankrolling the project on her own instead of giving in to pressure from an investor before she had worked out a workable strategy.
How Rise of Fearless will earn its keep remains one of the largest open questions. Advertising has brought in some income, yet Muluneh has chosen to hold off on a wider push to generate revenue, putting the quality of play and the growth of the player base first. She declined to reveal what the game earns from adverts or what it costs to run each month.
Creating a franchise owned by Africans
Muluneh's thinking on revenue now reaches past in-game spending and ads towards creating a wider brand around the game. After a trip to San Francisco in the United States, where she met leaders from the games business, she began exploring extra income streams: branded goods, live events, sponsorship deals and the licensing of the game's IP to others.
The founder says four gaming companies from abroad are coming on board as partners, joining the team that develops and publishes the game, with the goal of improving how it plays, sharpening its commercial approach and expanding the Rise of Fearless brand.
- Miniboss Solutions is a gaming consultancy that focuses on publishing and marketing. It is headed by Adam Krause, whose earlier career took in Ubisoft, 2K/Take-Two and Capcom, and by TJ Consunji, a former PlayStation and Krafton employee.
- Trick Question Studios, a company that develops entertainment IP, will lead on long-term brand planning and the creative vision. It is run by TQ Jefferson, an ex-Marvel and Disney executive who also held a senior management role at Pixar.
- IDG Intelligence is led by its CEO and president, Yoshio Osaki. The research and consulting company focused on the video games sector will contribute data analysis, market studies and know-how on investment planning.
- Spectra Entertainment is a studio that builds games and specialises in artwork, technical artistry and top-tier AAA production values; it will offer technical expertise intended to bolster how the title is built and how it looks.
According to Muluneh, the partnerships are meant to achieve more than a better game. Her aim is for specialists from abroad to pass technical knowledge on to African developers, so that the project keeps a larger share of its competitive advantage.
“Knowledge is the biggest asset right now. Knowledge and access,” she said. “You know, the African market always deals with the brain drain, where knowledgeable people leave the continent to build somewhere else. This time, we’ll do it the other way around, where we bring knowledge into the continent to build here.”
Rise of Fearless, the game in question, draws on Ethiopia's triumph over Italian troops at the Battle of Adwa. African cultures shape its cast, settings and visual identities, and Muluneh believes that this direction could help establish an entertainment franchise, owned by Africans, that is known across the globe.
“We [Africa] don’t lack talent; we lack knowledge and opportunities and people believing in us. I think that’s the biggest difference,” Muluneh said. “The whole goal is for them to transfer the knowledge onto the African developers, people, team, and communities.”
As it builds up a portfolio of gaming IP, the firm is also examining its tech and reworking parts of the story of Rise of Fearless. Muluneh said a thorough technical audit is under way, and once it is complete the team plans to bring back a better version. She gave no expected release date.
The hurdles facing African game developers
This push arrives at a time of continued growth in Africa's gaming market. Projections from Carry1st and Newzoo put the continent's gamer population at about 406 million by 2026, a rise fuelled by the spread of mobile phones.
Even so, the expanding market has left African game developers with plenty of obstacles. Studios hoping to win paying players in several countries are still held back by scarce funding, patchy infrastructure, payment systems that do not connect, and too little dependable data about the market.
Muluneh conceded that earning money from games on the continent is especially tough, since both payment infrastructure and the way consumers behave differ widely from one market to the next. These obstacles will weigh more heavily as Rise of Fearless tries to turn downloads into ongoing engagement and the revenue needed to break even.
“Maybe 80% of our work will be figuring out if we can get [the game] monetised throughout the whole continent, and not just the big markets,” she said. “Some countries are adaptive to it. Some are not. So it will remain a challenge.”
