Investments to the tune of $17 million are a rarity these days, but app-factory RockYou has done just that: the San Francisco-based company has announced that Japanese mobile giant SoftBank and Korean telecom investment company SK Telecom Ventures have invested $17 million to create a new joint venture to build apps for the Asia-Pacific market.
RockYou's Series C venture round, which pulled in $35 million, was in June--with the fresh $17 million, the company has raised $67 million so far.
This marks the entry of RockYou, which is best known for its Facebook and MySpace widgets, into the mobile space. "In Asia, over half the social networking occurs on mobile," CEO Lance Tokuda told CNET News. "It's both Web and mobile, and we think we'll get good penetration. The results on (Chinese social network) Xiaonei so far have been very good." RockYou says it is the first non-Chinese company to build apps on Xiaonei.
There will be a separate team handling RockYou's new Asia-Pacific operations, with operations coming from the new joint-venture investors as well. "In a lot of cases it's more cultural, where they'll take our assets and they'll port them and localize them," Tokuda said.
But there will be synergy as well, with mobile apps likely coming to the U.S. market after they're released in Asia. SoftBank is the Japanese carrier for Apple's iPhone, and iPhone apps created for it may eventually be converted to U.S. versions.
"We have no U.S. iPhone apps, and yes, we will port them back (from Asia)," Tokuda said.
So is the company giving up on Facebook's platform? No, Tokuda said, adding that they plan to keep building for it. Nor is the round specifically designed as recession padding, he added.
"There's still opportunity out there," he explained. "That said, it's good to raise a lot of money and have money in the bank, and this latest strategic round helps."
That rumor of a $400 million valuation might not be too far off base: social-media application powerhouse RockYou announced Monday that it has raised $35 million in Series C venture capital.
The round was led by venture firm DCM, with contributions from several private investors. Previous RockYou investors include Lightspeed Venture Partners, Partech International, and Sequoia Capital.
It's the kind of money that may raise a few eyebrows, considering many believe the social-application space doesn't offer a proven business model yet. RockYou is responsible for a number of popular applications--SuperWall, Vampires, Likeness, X Me--on Facebook and several OpenSocial-compatible platforms (MySpace, Hi5, Friendster, Bebo, and Orkut), as well as an ad network. The company has already done marketing campaigns for clients like Paramount, New Line Cinema, Sony, Microsoft, and CBS, and claims to have 87.5 million monthly unique visitors with 2.7 billion page views.
Along with Slide, RockYou is one of the biggest companies in the social-network application development space. And with the $35 million, RockYou plans to work on "additional tools and services" to further improve its advertising platform for brands and marketing campaigns that want to jump on the social-application craze.
"DCM believes that RockYou will be the catalyst of this new global ecosystem that delivers next-generation advertisements through its innovative advertising network and social applications," DCM co-founder and general partner David Chao said in a release. "With the current momentum, RockYou is positioned to become a top-10 Internet property in the world in the near future."
Disclosure: CBS, one of RockYou's past clients, has agreed to acquire CNET Networks, publisher of News.com. The deal is expected to close in the third quarter.
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