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Three weeks ago, Mashable had the news that social game developer Bunchball has raised a $4 million Series B from Granite Ventures and Adobe Ventures on top of an earlier $10 $2 million A round.
Writing about the funding, Tenuki’s Bret Terrill said, “In many ways, Bunchball is much further down the path than either Zynga or SGN. Bunchball has an amazing product, a complete game platform and analytics suite, complete with avatars, currency, leaderboards, etc. Rather than focusing on attracting eyeballs with hopes to get acquired by EA, Bunchball has sold their services to large media brands like NBC.”
While Bunchball has yet to achieve the success that SGN and Zynga have in terms of growth or engagement on Facebook, the additional funding should give them the resources to make a significant go of it over the coming year.
Update: Bunchball CEO Rajat Paharia responds in comments below that the company is not planning on taking on SGN and Zynga directly on social networks, but is focusing on building its business around building game mechanics into websites.
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May 5th, 2008 at 10:10 pm
Hey Justin - a few corrections.
Our Series A was $2M.
We’re not focusing on social gaming anymore.
We are focused on driving user behavior and making websites (any kind of websites) more engaging, through the use of game mechanics like virtual currency, leaderboards, challenges, etc. We’ve built these mechanics into a set of APIs and widgets that can be integrated into any site. NBC is our first customer, and you’ll see more in the next few months.
We find Facebook, Bebo, etc. very interesting for a lot of reasons, but not as competitors to SGN and Zynga. We wish those guys the best of luck!
best, - rajat