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Beyond the Summit:

Kano's Journey of Innovation & Recognition 🌍✨

Author

Magda Rajkowski
July 28, 2025

As the summer unfolds, we're taking a moment to reflect on Kano's exciting spring, including our participation in the first-ever Web Summit Vancouver, which took place in May 2025! 🚀 This landmark event brought together over 15,000 attendees from 117 countries, including more than 1,100 exhibiting startups, marking a record for any first-year Web Summit event.

Kano was proudly among the hundreds of firms showcasing at the summit, specifically featured within the BC Pavilion. This dedicated space, a collaboration between the Naturally Innovative Alliance and DigiBC , highlighted British Columbia's thriving creative technology sector. Our presence underscored Kano's role in the vibrant local tech scene and its global impact.

A major highlight was the "Built in BC. Played by Millions Worldwide" presentation, where our Founder and CEO, Tim Teh, shared Kano's unique journey alongside Sam Fisher, CEO of Hyper Hippo. 🤝

Kano's Journey: From Victoria Roots to Global Reach! 🏞️🏙️

Tim shared how Kano's story began in Victoria, the Capital of British Columbia, on Vancouver Island. "Like Hippo, our story starts in a smaller community, this time on Vancouver Island. Our story however started before mobile was even a viable platform like we know it today". Tim met his co-founders at the University of Victoria, and after gaining valuable experience in various organizations, they "stumbled upon Facebook’s new viral app platform" in 2008, amidst the Global Financial Crisis, and "took the plunge into game development".

Unlike some studios, Kano got "extremely lucky with our first, gaining over a quarter million players in weeks!". Working out of a condo, they bootstrapped to "one million in revenue in under a year" and were able to move into their first "real" office. Fast forward to today, Kano continues to be profitable and growing, "posting greater than eight figures of yearly revenue and now with a fully remote team".

Kano has released over ten games, with seven actively running in LiveOps. Beyond the successful RPG genre games, we also have a number of Idle games that we are actively growing in partnership with another great BC studio, East Side Games. This is a genre "pioneered by Hippo and a nice full circle moment in BC".

Recognized for Growth: Creative BC Funding! 🌟💰

Further cementing our position as a leader in BC's creative tech industry, Kano was recently announced as one of the first five B.C.-based video game studios to receive funding through the new Canada Media Fund (CMF) - Creative BC Video Game Development Program! This joint $1M investment aims to support the growth of studios like Kano, helping to develop creative intellectual properties and expand beyond project-by-project funding. Each successful applicant, including Kano, will receive $200,000 in funding. This exciting news was announced on March 25, 2025.

The Power of LiveOps: Games as a Service! 🎮💡

Tim emphasized the importance of LiveOps (Live Operations) at Kano. "LiveOps is essentially like running SaaS for games or Games as a Service where we are continually servicing our players with new content and regular events to keep them engaged, in many cases for years". This approach allows F2P (Free-to-Play) gaming companies like Kano to "book very consistent monthly recurring revenue that we can budget for growth against".

The Kano journey hasn't been without its hurdles, from platform shifts and rule changes to recent economic uncertainties. However, our Purpose guides us: "building meaningful connections through lasting social games". We create "social experiences with original IP for our players and build real meaningful relationships". Our players have formed lifelong friendships, gotten married, had babies, and even held memorial services for lost friends within our games! 💖

Looking Forward: Our Big Hairy Audacious Goal! ✨🎯

Kano has a "Big Hairy Audacious Goal, or BHAG, coined by Jim Collins, to grow to 1M weekly Committed players". For us, a Committed player is someone who has played a game for over 50 sessions, or returned to play 50 times. "Think about how many things that you have in your own life that you do with that level of commitment. We have tens of thousands of those players now and we want to continue to grow that number!".

A Shared BC Success Story! 🇨🇦🏆

Tim and Sam highlighted the collective impact: "Between our two BC-founded companies, we’ve had our games played by well over 120 million players around the world and we’ve jointly generated over $300 million dollars in revenue from players who love our wholly-owned, original IP games". This is truly "something for BC, for Canada, to be proud of"!

Key Takeaways from Web Summit Vancouver 🧠

The summit offered invaluable insights into the future of technology and innovation:

  • AI Dominates the Dialogue: Artificial intelligence was a pervasive topic, with discussions ranging from its potential to its challenges and future disruption.

  • Cracking the Gen Z Code: Businesses are increasingly prioritizing understanding and engaging with Generation Z, recognizing their unique influence on the market.

  • Local Women-Led Innovation Took the Spotlight: The event celebrated the growing presence and impact of women-led innovations within the tech ecosystem.

As Tim aptly concluded, "For all the aspiring entrepreneurs and game developers - with BC’s world class education, accessible tools, AI tailwinds, and a more connected world than ever before, we strongly believe that whether you’re in a big city or a small town, you can truly build something that reaches the world". Hyper Hippo and Kano are living proof of that!

Stay tuned for more exciting updates on Kano's ventures and achievements! 🌟

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