In a further show of support for blossoming virtual worlds, Madrid, Spain based eRepublik has recently announced that they’ve secured €2 million (approx. $2.8 million) in Series A funding from AGF Private Equity. Coining a new term, and dubbing themselves a MOSS (massive online social strategy game), eRepublik had previously secured just over $1 million from the VC firm as well as multiple angel investors. This new injection brings the total up to $3.8 million. Not bad for a small company for only about a year and a half and staffs just 30 employees.
The MOSS is a browser based virtual world that closely mimics today’s real world. Additionally, this virtual world contains no A.I., and relies solely on the participation of players (called appropriately, citizens). Somewhat like, but also different from Second Life, eRepublik allows citizens to participate in politics, the economy, set up businesses (currently at 17,502), interact socially with other citizens, and just to spice things up a bit: engage in wars with other countries (citizens live in eUSA, or eCanada, for example).
Live for only 576 days, eRepublik reports that the MOSS has over 350,000 citizen accounts, with 120,000 of them regularly logging in and participating in the active community. Taking a look at the traffic numbers, eRepublik is reporting that they’ve received over 3.7 million visits in the month of May alone, generating 95 million page views. Citizens have arrived from over 200 countries worldwide, and spent over 55 million minutes within the world.
eRepublik’s co-founder and CEO Alexis Bonte says that this new injection of fresh funds will be put towards fleshing out the existing world, as he says the current eRepublik is only 25% of what’s planned. They’ll also continue to expand eRepublik’s language offerings, as they just released a Spanish speaking version earlier this month, and move ahead with launching a host of new games.
eRepublik is free to play, and monetizes via sales of their in-game currency, eRepublik Gold. While no mentions were made about expanding out virtual goods offerings, something tells me that a bit of the $2.8 m has already been earmarked to ramp things up in the in-game store.
Hear what eRepublik is all about directly from Alexis Bonte in his TechCrunch pitch from last summer.
Tags: agf private equity, Alexis Bonte, eRepublik, MOSS, Second Life, strategy game, virtual world, virtual worlds
