Malpa Games is a Cyprus-based game publishing company that specializes in casual puzzle games. Founded in 2022, the company focuses on publishing games and supporting developers through various business and distribution initiatives. Their flagship titles, "Word Search Sea" and "Word Pizza", emphasize creative collaboration, innovation, and quality. Together, these games have achieved over 65 million downloads worldwide.

The capital allocation dilemma: Marketing scale or portfolio expansion?

As a publisher, Malpa Games has achieved significant success for its third-party developers, garnering millions of downloads for its titles. The company’s success can be attributed to its ability to identify opportunities to scale the profitability of these games, along with its structured processes in localization, monetization, and user acquisition.

With their success came a new challenge - one that many game publishers face: an influx of requests from developers seeking publishing support. Malpa Games needed to make a decision quickly. Where to place their capital – scale or expansion? Given the time sensitivity of the new opportunities, the team was inclined to take on new projects, albeit at the expense of limiting the scaling potential of its existing games.

After a referral from the Founder of the Mobile Finance Collective, Malpa Games learned about user acquisition financing, a form of funding specifically designed to support marketing spending for user acquisition. UA financing would simultaneously address both marketing scale and portfolio expansion without incurring further equity dilution to the company.

Malpa accepts UA financing: Scaling revenue and cash reserves simultaneously

Now, they needed to find the right financing partner who could meet their requirements. Malpa Games discovered PvX Partners and applied for their loans. After carefully reviewing Malpa Games' cohorts, PvX Partners proposed a credit facility that would allow Malpa to draw down from a $20 million line of credit over a 12-month term. The fund would be used to support up to 80% of the new user acquisition campaigns for titles, including Word Search Game, Word Pizza, and Word Spells. The loan is structured as a non-recourse loan that does not involve any share pledges, IP pledges, or floating charges on the company. This credit structure effectively enables cohort risk sharing between PvX Partners and Malpa Games.

On a monthly basis, PvX funds a portion of Malpa's marketing expenses, which will be repaid through a share of the net revenues generated from each month’s newly acquired users. The structure is performance-based—Malpa only pays interest based on how fast their campaigns recoup their investment.

This unique repayment mechanism, based on a share of the net revenues generated from each month's newly acquired users, will keep Malpa's cash flows in lockstep with its incoming revenues, ensuring the company always has sufficient funds to service the loan. Strategically, the funding enables Malpa Games to increase its marketing spend as long as it remains profitable while maintaining a majority of its budget for investment in new projects.

Malpa Games grows cash balance by $3M while scaling spends

The company has utilized this facility to cover 80% of its marketing expenses over the past five months, allowing it to conserve over $3 million in cash reserves while simultaneously scaling its marketing efforts by 81% since January 2025.

Since working with PvX Partners, Malpa Games has kickstarted three additional titles for publishing. The financing from PvX enables them to utilize their cash reserves without hindering the growth of their existing portfolio. Once these new titles achieve stable scale and profitability, Malpa Games plans to include them in the UA funding portfolio to help unlock their next phase of growth as well.