There’s always a moment in tech where a founder catches the signal before the noise. Taehoon Kim, “TK” if you’ve spent more than five minutes in a room with him, has made a career out of spotting those moments, then turning them into movement. He did it with Power Rangers: Legacy Wars (100M+ downloads) before most mobile studios understood F2P retention curves. He did it again at nWay, which Animoca Brands scooped up in 2020. Now he’s back at it with Spekter Games, and this time, the signal’s bouncing off Telegram, refracted through Web3, and cutting deep into the roguelite genre.
Spekter Games just came out swinging with a $5M pre-seed round, led by a16z Games through their Speedrun accelerator, with backup from London Venture Partners, BRV Capital, Chamaeleon, Accelerator Ventures, Impact46, Versus Ventures, and Alumni Ventures. This wasn’t a warm-up. The round closed oversubscribed on launch day. That’s not luck, it’s signal clarity.
Let’s talk strategy, because this isn’t another “Web3 but fun” pitch. Spekter’s first title, Spekter Agency, is live in open alpha on Telegram, a platform with 1B+ MAUs, many of whom have never seen a Vampire Survivors-style roguelite land in their chats. One-handed real-time controls, passive rewards earned off-session, and an embedded wallet that handles the complexity while players chase leaderboard clout. It’s Web3 without the whitepaper lectures.
What TK and the team understand, deep in the code and the cadence, is that gamers want frictionless fun. They want gameplay-first, not gas-fee-first. So Spekter games keep it clean, off-chain for performance, passive Web3 for the grind. The “Spark” points quietly rack up while you’re offline, converting later into a cross-game token that stays cosmetic and status-based, because TK knows the second you cross the pay-to-win line, you’ve lost the room.
Spekter isn’t just threading the needle between mobile gaming and Web3. It’s re-engineering where and how games get discovered. Starting with Telegram, but already eyeing Kakao, Line, and traditional app stores. First mover advantage isn’t just about speed, it’s about finding the right wave to ride before the lineup gets crowded.
They’re hiring now, live ops, Unity engineers, product minds who think in loops and LTV. The target is clear, 3.2B mobile gamers, and a billion of them are already in Telegram. TK isn’t building for hype cycles. He’s building the next distribution layer for fun-first games with just enough token magic under the hood to make you look twice.
