MoMinis raises $4.5M for mobile casual games

BRM Group and Mitsui Ventures come in again for the second round

MoMinis, an Israeli mobile game developer, announced Wednesday that it's raised a Series B round of funding in the order of $4.5 million from existing investors Israeli-based BRM Group and Japanese-based Mitsui Ventures. This brings the total round of funding to $9.2 million.

MoMinis, which was founded in 2008, is the maker of casual games on Android devices, such as Ninja Chicken. It was the No. 2 game in the US Android market and the No. 1 game in China, Russia, Germany, Italy and the UK. It had nine million downloads in under three months, said Itzik Frid, CEO of MoMinis, in an interview with me. 

All the games have been developed by a crowdsourced group of game developers. At the moment, the company has more than 10,000registered developers and more than 31 game studios working with with it to turn their PC games to Android-based games.

A unique feature about MoMinis is that games are cross-promoted to the players. Additionally, MoMinis has created PlayScape, which is a platform that aggregates all of its more than 50 game titles. Anyone who's downloaded PlayScape can use one virtual currency across all the games and use one reward system that's transferable between games. PlayScape has been downloaded 15 million times in three months. The time spent on PlayScape is 30 minutes a day, said Frid.

Altogether, MoMinis games have been downloaded more than 16 million times from players around the world, 40% of whom are in the US. The company is also popular in Europe (Germany, Russia, UK) and in Asia.

The company is primarily on Android devices. It plans on releasing its games on the iPhone in Q4, and on Windows Mobile in 2013.

As for monetization, MoMinis recently integrated advertisements from mobiel ad networks AdMob and Millenial. And, it recently turned on virtual currency and virtual goods for its players, said Frid.