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Scoreloop receives $2.8M second round of funding

Scoreloop, a mobile social gaming community, closed a $2.8 million round of funding from investors EarlyBird Venture Capital and Target Partners.

According to a study by Pyramid Research, the global mobile gaming market is expected to be worth $18 billion by 2014. The funding from Earlybird and Target Partners aims to fuel the overall market, as well as Scoreloop's role within it as an infrastructure provider of mobile social gaming for game developers and publishers.

"The new funding provides the fuel to be here for the long term," said Marc Gumpinger, CEO at Scoreloop, Munich, Germany. "We're going to continue to build the corporate structure to serve the larger game publishers and operators.

"We're also expanding business development globally across Europe, North American and Asia -- with a local presence in each region," he said.

Scoreloop is a mobile social gaming community that uses a virtual currency and social networking aspects to generate revenue.

By implementing player challenges, where each player must wager at least one coin per challenge, not only do games spread virally, but Scoreloop generates revenue that it can then share with developers in the Scoreloop community (see story).

Since its launch in May 2009, Scoreloop has more than 500 registered game developers who have published more than 40 games in the Apple App Store.

"We've shown that we have the right strategy so far," Mr. Gumpinger said. "We've focused on player challenges as our unique proposition and we now have over 500 developers with more and more Scoreloop-enabled games in Apple App Store each week.

"We're taking it to the next level and signing deals with the big players that provide growth and visibility," he said. "We've got the killer combo with the best technology and significant market reach with our new large-game-publisher partner relationships."

While Scoreloop currently only supports games on the iPhone platform, the recent funding from EarlyBird and Target Partners will be used to further develop Scoreloop technology, go cross-platform and maintain focus on international business development.

Earlybird Venture Capital claims that the technology and community platform from Scoreloop solve many of the problems that developers and users are facing in the world of mobile applications by increasing discoverability of games and making the user-experience more relevant.

Target Partners admits that it is optimistic about its partnership with Scoreloop.

"Mobile is a lot closer to the consumer than any other device," Mr. Gumpinger said. "For example, take push notifications coming from a player challenge. This is so much closer than opening a laptop and seeing that someone wants to play a game with you.

"With mobile you always have the device with you and it's a lot more personal," he said. "It's becoming obvious that the mobile device will replace the wallet. Gaming will be a big part of it and challenges will be the communications channel."