Vatar, the company behind Lagos Life, is in talks to raise additional funding, according to sources familiar with the matter.
The company is targeting a $2.5 million pre-seed round at a $15 million valuation, following a $500,000 angel round that valued it at $10 million. The angel round attracted investors, including Flutterwave founder Olugbenga Agboola, Oo Nwoye, Mono founder Abdulhamid Hassan, and Terra Industries CEO Nathan Nwachukwu, barely a week after the company launched this month.
Lagos Life is a browser-based game that allows players to live and interact in a virtual world modelled on Nigerian cities.
Represented by avatars, players can get jobs, interact with others, spend money, acquire property and move around a virtual city. Beyond advertising within the game, businesses are increasingly using the platform to reach customers, operate within its virtual environment and, in some cases, conduct transactions.
The game launched with Lagos as its first city before expanding to include Abuja and Port Harcourt. Within three days of launch, Lagos Life had attracted one million sign-ups. The number of players has since reached 10 million, according to updates from founder Shalom Rayhamen, who reportedly built the game in one night.
Vatar has also moved quickly to monetise the platform, generating more than $170,000 in booked and realised revenue from advertising and music promotion within the game.
Lagos Life’s rapid rise has fuelled conversations about the possibilities artificial intelligence is opening up for African builders. Rayhamen, herself a developer, built a game that would traditionally have taken months, if not years, to complete in a single night.
The platform has also inspired a wave of AI-assisted games from Nigerian developers, many seeking to recreate familiar Nigerian experiences in virtual worlds.