Frederic Lardinois
It's not quite at the scale of Zynga or its European competitors King.com and Wooga yet, but the Barcelona-based social games developer SocialPoint just raised a $7.4M Series B round led by Idinvest Partners with participation from a number of other funds, including BBVA and Nauta Capital. The company raised its first round of financing worth $3.4 million in June 2011. This first round was led by Nauta Capital and marked the venture firm's first investment in a gaming company.
SocialPoint, which was founded in 2008, says that it currently has over 15 million active monthly users who regularly play its social Facebook games like Social Empires, Social Wars and Dragon City. Social Empires was SocialPoint's first major hit and the company has been releasing a steady stream of new games ever since. Besides Facebook, though, the company also plans to release a number of iOS games later this year, including the first mobile version of Social Empires.
SocialPoint plans to use this new round of funding to hire more developers, game designers, IT engineers and support staff, as well as to launch new social games and finance its push into the mobile games market. These new mobile games, says SocialPoint, "will allow for seamless integration between different platforms."
Social gaming still remains a relatively hit-driven business, but with King.com, Kobojo, Wooga, GamePoint, Peak, SocialPoint and numerous others, there is clearly a lively and growing social gaming scene in Europe these days. It's worth noting that Idinvest Partners, the lead investor in this round, is also an investor in SocialPoint's French rival (and Microsoft Imagine Cup winner) Kobojo, as well as the London-based social gaming casino games startup Plumbee.
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