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Pengu Creator Slay Raised $5M for a Social Gaming Platform

Slay’s $5 million Accel-led round aimed to turn Pengu into a broader social gaming and creation platform. The company later became Born and raised further funding.
From TheFinanceBase Team2 min to read
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Berlin-based Slay announced a $5 million financing round led by Accel to build social and creation features around Pengu, its virtual-pet app. The round was documented by its legal adviser on February 25, 2024; GamesBeat reported on it on June 20, 2024. The distinction matters: June 20 is the date of the media report, not evidence that the funding closed that day.

What is Pengu?

Pengu is a mobile virtual-pet app in which players raise a digital penguin, play mini-games and connect with friends or family. One social feature lets people co-parent a pet. Slay CEO Fabian Kamberi described a cooperative loop in which friends feed their Pengus and play a mini-game to earn coins and a shared-feeling reward. GamesBeat covered the app and the round in its June 20, 2024 report.

Who invested in Slay?

The $5 million round was led by Accel, according to both the company’s legal adviser, NEON’s February 25, 2024 deal announcement, and GamesBeat. Other named participants reported by GamesBeat were Laton VC; HYBE America CEO Scooter Braun; King co-founder Riccardo Zacconi; Popcore co-founder Johannes Heinze; Supercell co-founder and CEO Ilkka Paananen; and Tripledot co-founder and CEO Lior Shiff.

Accel partner Luca Bocchio said the investment would support Slay as it expanded its existing ecosystem and intellectual property. The reported investor list identifies participants; it does not establish individual investment amounts.

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What did Slay plan to do with the $5 million?

Slay said it would use the financing to expand Pengu beyond a virtual-pet app into a social gaming and content-creation platform. Its plans included social features, customizable games and characters, possible AI features, and a developer platform for users and commercial studios to create content and worlds inside Pengu. These were stated ambitions, not confirmation that every feature had launched.

GamesBeat reported that Slay had already integrated several developer-created games and was in discussions with other studios. The funding thesis was to build on an existing app and its characters, not to create a separate hardware platform.

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How large was Slay in 2024?

GamesBeat reported the following figures from Slay in June 2024. They are company-attributed figures, not independently audited measurements or current performance data.

Measure Figure reported Scope and qualification
Monthly active users More than 2.5 million Across Slay’s apps
Daily active users 650,000 Across Slay’s apps
Downloads More than 10 million Across Slay’s apps
Pengu daily active users More than 500,000 For Pengu specifically, as reported after its late-2023 launch
Pengu App Store ratings Nearly 100,000 Reported after the late-2023 launch; ratings are not the same as downloads or active users

Kamberi also told GamesBeat that 2024 revenue to that point was 10 times 2023 revenue. That was his reported comparison, not an independently audited result; the report did not establish that the growth rate would continue.

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What happened to Slay after the round?

Slay later changed its name to Born. In September 2025, TechCrunch described Pengu as a freemium AI companion app with an optional Pengu Pass and reported that Born raised a $15 million Series A, bringing its stated total funding to $25 million. The company said it had more than 15 million users globally, but had not disclosed how many were paying customers. The user figure therefore should not be read as a subscriber count. See TechCrunch’s September 10, 2025 report; Accel’s recruiting page also describes the company as Born and says it had raised $25 million to date (Accel Jobs).

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