Over the course of 2009 we saw the world on the verge of an economic collapse. While the current economic situation has hit some industries harder than others, and as we learned, even the video games industry isn’t recession proof. However, if venture capitalists remain bullish on virtual worlds and goods as they did this past week, 2010 could be a banner year for the industry as a whole. This past week alone, three individual companies saw injections of cash totaling $23.74 million. Let’s take a look at who got a part of the take this week.
Crowdflower
Crowdflower is an outsourced labor startup that rewards work with both real world money and/or virtual currency. Led by Trinity Ventures and Bessemer Venture Partners, Crowdflower also received funding from it’s original angel investors including the Founders Fund, Travis Kalanick, Marcus Ogawa, Manu Kumar, Gary Kremen, and Lorenzo Thione. This round of funding saw a healthy $5 million aid Crowdflower’s startup efforts.
The concept is simple enough: outsourcing mundane task that can’t be automated to a crowd sourced pool of workers that sign on to perform a small part of each task. For their efforts, workers man then choose between monetary or virtual currency payment. Currently partnered with Gambit, Crowdflower has completed over eight million tasks, grown revenue over 750 percent, and increased their labor output by 760 percent.
6 Waves
Hong Kong based 6 Waves made out with the bandits share of this week’s booty, garnering $17.5 million. Funding arrives from Insight Venture Partners. 6 Waves has filled various roles within the virtual worlds community, one of developer, and the other as publisher, specifically through promotion and monetization support for other social game developers.
“We started publishing for Chinese developers, but we have since diversified to work with developers from all over the world. “ comments co-founder Rex Ng. “To date, we have partnered with many developers from US, Canada, France, China, Hong Kong, and Singapore, with more in the pipeline. Since our audience spans across North America, Europe and Asia, 6 waves provide a one-stop shop for developers to reach a global audience.”
If you’ve never heard of 6 Waves, now would be the time to sit up and notice. Currently, they’re one of the largest developers on Facebook, operating 141 apps and serving approximately 44 million monthly users. To put their growth rate into perspective, only one year prior, 6 Waves was serving 22 million monthly users from a pool of around 60 apps. And now for the kicker – the 6 Waves team is made up of only 18 people, proving that lean-and-mean can get the job done.
Rixty
Rixty, a payment services provider recently announced a $1.24 million seed from Javelin Venture Partners, Accelerator Ventures, First Round Capital, Freestyle Capital, Nueva Ventures, and Soft Tech VC. Additionally, “several” undisclosed angel investors took part. As part of the deal, Javelin Venture Partners Managing Director Noah Doyle will not be sitting on Rixty’s board of directors, as will DIgg’s current VP of Product, Kevin Desai. Both men have experience in online payment platforms, Doyle formerly of MyPoints.com and Desai from Achex, which went on to be acquired by First Data.
Rixty’s main tenant is facilitating virtual goods purchases for those that might not always have access to said content (read: no credit card). Working in cooperation with CoinStar, Rixty users are issued an exclusive PIN that they can enter into a CoinStar machine to receive their payout not in the form of cold, hard cash, but rather in virtual currency points. The currency points are then tabulated at Rixty, and through partnerships, gamers may then use this Rixty cash in their (hopefully partnered) game of choice. By keeping users’ virtual currencies in house, Rixty leverages this power and is certain to keep users coming back for more through various promotions, contests, and giveaways.
Again, $23.74 million in Venture Capital funding was announced just this week alone, and we’re only three weeks into a new year. Let’s hope that these funding sprees continue, and that 2010 will see a continued increase in not only the number of options available, but as the industry grows, so will the quality and innovation levels increase.
The funding round closed at the end of 2009 and was lead by Institutional Venture Partners. As is customary, IVP general partner Sandy Miller will now take a seat on Ngmoco’s board of directors. Previous investors Kleiner Perkins, Norwest Venture Partners, and Maples Investments also took part in this round of funding, raising Ngmoco’s total investments to $40.6 million. Not bad for a 1.5 year old startup.
