What a day. If you’ve not heard, or have been hiding under a rock, both Zynga and Smule on Wednesday announced that they’ve raised significant sums of financing.
It just so happens that the CEOs of both companies will be headlining our VatorSplash event this February 4, 2010.
Their momentum will be sure to make the event a Double Splash!
Let’s start with Zynga, which just raised a massive round of $180 million. Russian investment firm Digital Sky Technologies, which also invested in Facebook
back in May is leading the round with Andreesen Horowitz and Tiger Global
also participating. Zynga’s raised $219 million to-date. And, according to some number crunchers found by the NYTimes, the social gaming phenom could be worth nearly $3 billion. Quite a stunning number and an impressive run for a company that just started in 2008.
CEO and founder Mark Pincus will be onstage for 25 minutes talking about how he built the biggest multi-billion social gaming company in just a couple years, and how he’s attracted 230 million monthly
active users playing its games from FarmVille, Café
World, Zynga
Poker, Mafia
Wars, YoVille, FishVille and the recently announced PetVille.
Smule announced it’s secured $8 million in additional
financing. New investor, Shasta Ventures led the round. Existing
investors Bessemer Venture Partners and Granite Ventures also
participated in the round. This brings Smule’s total funding to $13.5
million.
CEO and co-founder Jeff Smith will be onstage for 25 minutes talking about how he’s building the best iPhone app publisher out there and reveal some secrets behind how he’s created hit after hit products that are among the highest-grossing on the app store, like I am T-Pain and Ocarina, to name a few.
Both CEOs are serial entrepreneurs, and founders of companies that went public. Jeff founded and took email software company Tumbleweed public while Mark co-founded and brought SupportSoft public.
Be sure to make it to San Francisco to catch them onstage. In
honor of this day, I’m giving out for 24 hours 35% discounted tickets
to the event. Go to the event page and use “doublesplash” as the
discount code.
If you want to share the stage with them and be a presenting startup, be sure to join the Splash competition!
(Image source: cachet4.asset-cache.net)
