Ravio Mobile raises $42 Million in Series A Funding Round

Ravio Mobile Ltd., the producer company of the Angry Birds game, has raised $42 million in the series A financing round led by the venture capitalists at Accel Partners, Atomico Ventures and Felicis Ventures. With this occasion, Niklas Zennstorm, one of the co-founders of Skype and Atomic Ventures, has joined Ravio’s board.

Nobody would have believed that a game based on some angry birds and several pigs will raise such a big amount of funds as the game was not expected to attract so many players from the beginning. But the public has been so fascinated with this addictive game that they bid into it even faster than they did with Skype. The huge growth of the popularity of the game made investors trust this product with their funds. Mr. Zennstrom declaired on Thursday that “Angry Birds is one of the fastest-growing online products I’ve seen, growing even faster than Skype, and the company has done a brilliant job of extending it across different platforms and merchandise.”

The Angry Birds game has turned Ravio into the fastest growing company producing mobile games. The game has been released in 2009, as a suitable product for iPhones. Since then, the game attracted more than 40 million active users who have purchased not only the game, but also products from the plush toys line. The company has declared that its offline merchandise venture is continuously growing, reaching more than two million sold units. By offering their public more products related to the Angry Birds game, the managers at Ravio satisfy the needs of the public, grow the scope of interest onto far much more clients and maintain a constant growth of their revenues.

As a matter of fact, this is one of the purposes for which they will use the venture capital money raised in this Series A of funding. The staff at Ravio plans to develop and enlarge the scope of action of the Angry Birds. That is to say that they will use the funds from venture capitalists to adapt and to push Angry Birds onto new platforms, such as video game consoles, and to widen their market onto other countries worldwide. Mikael Hed, the Chief Executive at Ravio Mobile, has stated on Thursday that “We will strengthen the position of Rovio and continue building our franchises in gaming, merchandising and broadcast media.”

This is a market that will continue to develop due to the new technologies on which you can upload games. It is due to the latest mobile devices and social media sites that more games become an active consumer’s culture. These are the platforms that allowed Ravio and Zynga to develop at this amazing speed and to become so popular in the last several years. Despite the obvious tendency, some analysts are still skeptical about this type of businesses that generally rely on few blockbuster games which cannot sustain a long time growth.

But the venture capitalists who decided to fund Ravio announce that they have full confidence in the continuous growth of this company. Richard Wong from Accel Partners declared that: “Mario brothers started as a very specific arcade game and then moved across a lot of different. Once you have a huge audience, you can start to develop new pieces of intellectual property.”