Badgeville raises $12 million to construct Gamification

The Gamification start-up Badgeville managed to attract capital in amount of $12 million in a second round of funding. This amount is destined to be use in order to develop a strategy of adding game-like features to the non-game applications.

The Chief Executive from the Menlo Park, which is the Californian-based Badgeville, Kris Duggan, declared that this amount of money is going to be used by the company in order to accelerate its growth and to manage to leave behind quickly the other dozen or so gamification start-ups. The advantage of Badgeville is that it’s Dynamic Game Engine and Widget Studio helps clients become loyal in a way which can easily be measured. Duggan declared that Badgeville allows its customers shower their users with achievements and rewards which generally help to the improvement of the key user-driven objectives, such as retention, to a percentage of 30%. It has been recently that the company has launched the 2.0 version of its engine platform.

This second round of funding has been led by the Norwest Venture partners and the El Dorado Ventures, along with the already existing investors, the Trinity Ventures and the Webb Investment Network. After this new round of funding, Tim Chang, from the Norwest, and Tom Peterson, from El Dorado, are to join the board at Badgeville.

The funding has been revealed by Duggan today, at the GamesBeat 2011 conference in San Francisco. He declared the following: “This investment comes [on] the heels of two consecutive seven-figure sales quarters, and 40 percent quarter over quarter growth”. He also added that the intention for these funds is that of increasing the team and scaling up the offering of the company.

The company started-up last fall and now has more than 75 customers coming from the following fields of activity: e-commerce, entertainment, media, education, fitness, enterprise and service. Some of the most known customers are: Discovery Communications, NBC, Interscope Records, Major league Gaming, Bluefly.com, The Active Network, LiveMocha and Deloitte Digital. On these data, the board expects the company to increase by several hundred other customers by the end of the year to come. Badgeville would like its services to be a good mix of custom work and automation. Duggan added the following: “We needed to get more ammunition into the company to scale the business and be recognized as the clear leader. Our plan is to be the Salesforce.com of gamification.”

Despite the demand for this type of products, there are critics who believe that gamification is a superficial way of persuading customers to engaging with websites, which is totally fad and boring. On the other hand, Duggan did not contradict this point, stating that the benefits of gamification should not be exaggerated: “You won’t turn all of enterprise software into a game. You can make it a little more game like, make it more fun, and make it meaningful, genuine and desirable.”

Gartner, the market researcher, announced that it is likely that more than 70% of the top 2,000 worldwide companies are to have at least one gamified application by 2014. In the previous round of funding, Badgeville raised $3 million.