Wednesday, July 9, 2008

Virtual Worlds Are So Hot Right Now: $345 Million Invested So Far This Year

I feel like today is Virtual World Day. We started off the morning covering the public beta launch of Vivaty, then Second Life and IBM announced that they bridged two virtual worlds, and Google launched its own version of virtual worlds with Lively.

If it seems like everybody is starting their own virtual world, it
is because they are. A report put out today by Virtual Worlds
Management tracks $161 million put into 14 virtual-world investments
during the second quarter of 2008. In the first quarter
there was even more activity, with $184 million put into 23 virtual
worlds and supporting technology companies. That brings the total this
year alone to $345 million across 37 deals. Some notable deals (you can
see the full lists by clicking on the last two links above):


Second Quarter 2008


Grockit——————-MMO Learning Game——-$8 million——-Integral Capital and Benchmark


Nurien Software——–3D social networking——-$15 million——-Northern Light, Globespan, NEA


PrimeSense————-Gestural Interface———-$20.4 million—–Led by Canaan Partners


Realtime Worlds———-MMOG Developer———$50 million——–Maverick Capital, NEA


Stanford Parallel —-Parallel Processing————–$6 million——-Sun Microsystems, AMD, Nvidia, IBM,

Processing Lab for Virtual Worlds HP, and Intel


Turbine———————-MMOG——————-$40 million————–Time Warner and GGV Capital


First Quarter 2008


9You———–Virtual World/Casual Games——$100 million——–Temasek Holdings


Dizzywood —————Youth World————— $1 million——-Shelby Bonnie, Charles River Ventures


EveryScape————— Mirror World————–$7 million——–Dace, Draper Fisher Jurvetson


Fix8 ———————- Avatar Content————$2 million ——–SK Telecom


Gizmoz ——————- Avatar Creation ———- $6.5 million——-DoCoMo Capital, ngi group


iOpener ——————–Mixed Reality ————-$6 million———Triangle Venture Capital


Sparkplay Media——Casual MMO with Games—–$4.25 million—–Redpoint, Prism Ventureworks


Unisfair ——————–Virtual Events Platform—–$10 million——-Norwest, Sequoia Capital

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