One company that has been strongly impacted by the Silicon Valley Bank collapse last week is esports coaching platform Metafy. If you are not familiar with the company, it describes itself as a platform that lets customers “book 1-on-1 coaching sessions” with professional players in various games.
The Los Angeles company has raised $34.4M USD to date over three funding rounds with participation from YouTuber Cody Ko, Fortnite pro and content creator Lachlan Power, AngelList Talent founder Naval Ravikant, Cameo Co-Founder and CEO Steven Galanis, Cameo Co-Founder and CTO Devon Townsend, Amazon exec Jeffrey Wilke, Seven Tiger Global Management, Seven Six, M25, Forerunner Ventures, Entrée Capital, and DCM Ventures. In November of 2021 it acquired UK-based coaching platform GamersRdy and in May of 2022 it acquired Denmark-based game coaching platform GamerzClass.
On Saturday, Victor Folmann, vice president of finance and operations at Metafy (he was the founder of GamerzClass and joined the company in April of 2022 prior to the acquisition of his company) said that he had been awake for 24 hours as he took “proactive steps” to make sure his company would weather the situation related to SVB. Those steps included moving the company’s accessible cash holdings to other financial institutions, speaking with experts who have gone through similar situations to plan accordingly, suspending all “recurring non-essential software services” and temporarily removing credit card info to avoid charges (temporarily), negotiations with creditors to delay invoices for up to three months, scheduling meetings with eight debt providers for this week, updating information with merchant services so that payments are deposited into new bank accounts, speaking with shareholders about additional funding (if needed), and informing the team about everything the company is doing to adjust to whatever happens with SVB and federal regulators this week.
In a subsequent public statement on Sunday, Folmann seemed to be satisfied with a joint statement from the Treasury Department, FDIC, and the Federal Reserve saying that “all depositors with money at SVB will be made whole.”