6Waves raises $35 million post-Lolapps merger

Insight Venture Partners is the primary participant, based on SEC filing

Social games publisher 6Waves has raised $35 million in new funding, according to this SEC filing published Monday. Listed on the filing are two representatives from Insight Venture Partners, the firm that presumably led the round.

Insight previously raised $17.5 million in equity financing for the company, back in January 2010.

We’ve reached out to the company to confirm the round, but have not yet heard reply.

6Waves, which recently merged with Lolapps, ranks fourteenth on AppData’s leaderboard for developers on Facebook. The company sees 1.7 million daily active users and 19.6 million monthly active users across over 400 applications, from games like Kingdom of Camelot and Animal Party to simple apps like Quiz Creator and Daily Horoscope.

The three most popular apps from 6Waves (in terms of monthly active users) include Ravenwood Fair (5.0 million), Give Hearts (3.9 million) and iHearts (1.4 million).  

Two weeks ago, 6Waves merged with Lolapps with the clear intention of challenging social games titan Zynga, which is itself gearing up for a fall IPO that could raise $1 billion for the company. Based on AppData statistics, 6Waves Lolapps still has a long, long way to go before catching up with Zynga. They even lag smaller gaming companies like wooga, Electronic Arts and Playdom.

With the social gaming space in such an intense stage of evolution right now, however, it really could be anybody’s market in the next couple years.

“We’re going to be the clear number two in the space very quickly,” said Lolapps CEO Arjun Sethi, at the time of the merger. Sethi now reports to 6Waves CEO Rex Ng.

6Waves might actually be further along than its app stats represent, since the company works with a wide variety of developers to distribute their games. While AppData says the company sees 19.6 million monthly active users, 6Waves itself reports having over 40 million players on Facebook.

If the company gets back to us about the funding round, we’ll also work toward clearing this data discrepancy.