MegaZebra rakes in millions for social gaming

German social game developer raises funds from Doughty Hanson and Kizoo for Facebook games

Social gaming developer MegaZebra has raised a multi-million-euro investment from Doughty Hanson Technology and previous backer Kizoo Technology Ventures. As part of the deal, Sitar Teli from Doughty Hanson and Matthias Hornberger from Kizoo will join MegaZebra's board of directors.

Founded in 2008 and headquartered in Munich, Germany, MegaZebra offers at least 15 titles, many of which are based on classic card and puzzle games, like CrazyBunnies (crazy eights), Zebra Mahjong, Zebra Sudoku and Zebra BlackJack. Some of the other games, like JewelsRock and Zebra Aquatwist, are less well-known universally, but still reminiscent of other Web games.

More than half of MegaZebra’s games are supported on a couple platforms besides Facebook, like MySpace and Spickmich, but the newer games appear to be offered exclusively on Facebook. It probably makes it a lot easy on the developers to be targeting a single social platform and it’s a huge win for Mark Zuckerberg’s social network too.

Bizarrely, just yesterday I noted that, though we hadn’t seen as much social gaming funding news as we were accustomed to, it would make sense to see more of that news coming from emerging markets. Zynga and a few others have social gaming a little bit on lockdown here in the states, but games on Facebook for users abroad can still be developed by smaller studios with little competition.

MegaZebra will use its newfound capital to continue growing the company, which includes making new hires. Currently, the company’s job page lists four open positions for a Flash developer, a PHP developer, an illustrator and a game designer/product manager.