watAgame impresses with safety and viral growth
(18.7.2007) LONDON, ENGLAND, 8th July ––Accel Partners today announces a €3 million investment for the Denmark based company behind goSupermodel, a social networking game for teenage girls centered around fashion and user generated content. The funding will be used to launch goSupermodel in new markets and further develop the game.
Created in 2005 and live in Denmark, United States, Germany, Netherlands and Norway, goSupermodel is the star product in the portfolio of online games developed by watAgame. The product is a fashion themed virtual community and allows teenage girls between the ages of 10 and 16 to create and style their own model character.
Using their character girls can interact with their peers as a model in the virtual fashion community, attending photo-shoots, dance competitions, designing their own clothing lines and making new friends. The site's key focus is personal expression, creativity and imagination and users are represented online by their avatar rather than a picture ensuring that this creativity and friendliness supersede physical appearance in the game.
The games' unique attraction has been its unprecedented advances in online safety. Given the vulnerable nature of its audience online watAgame has invested a great deal of energy into ensuring user security and safety. Using a combination of human moderation combined with a very sophisticated safety software system it is watAgame's goal to always be one of the safest places for girls on the net.
watAgame was founded in 2003 and published several online mobile game concepts during 2004 and 2005. Soon after its Danish launch in 2005 goSupermodel revealed its potential and watAgame quickly concentrated all of its resources on the concept making it the sole focus for the company.
A strong priority on letting users express themselves creatively in many different ways inside goSupermodel has created a community with very devoted users who spend a large amount of time online. As a result the Danish goSupermodel site today has an impressive 40% of all girls age 10-16 in Denmark as active users.
Henrik Riis, CEO of watAgame said; "goSupermodel has proven to grow very quickly without the need for any additional marketing. The community recently reached 1 million users and is now racing towards 2 million. With such a rapid growth we decided to seek funding so that we can hire new people to help us launch in other markets and expand the features available in the product. We chose Accel because they are a strong international venture capitalist firm with extensive knowledge of our space and an extremely solid network internationally, crucially in the US."
Heikki Makijarvi, Accel Partners said; "We know that teens now spend more time online than with any other media and also that there is a large variety of web communities out there battling for the interest and loyalty of users. The key differentiator with goSupermodel is that they have targeted a niche demographic of younger teenage girls and focused strongly entirely on allowing them to express themselves. The rapid growth of the community and their successes in generating solid revenue show that goSupermodel is an extremely successful example of a new generation of niche social networking"
To visit goSupermodel go to www.gosupermodel.com.
About Accel Partners:
Founded in 1983, Accel Partners is one of the world's leading venture capital firms. The firm is dedicated to partnering with outstanding entrepreneurs to build world-class Internet, software and networking companies. Accel Partners has more than $4bn under management from its offices in Palo Alto, London, and China, and its portfolio companies have completed IPOs that have created well over $150 billion in market capitalization. Representative current and former investments include Brightcove, Comscore, Double Fusion, Facebook, Glam, Macromedia, RealNetworks, and The Cloud. For more information, please visit www.Accel.com.
About watAgame:
Founded in 2003, watAgame produces, publishes and operates social network game goSupermodel which targets girls 10-16. Today goSupermodel has more than 1 million registered users creating more than 180 million page impressions per month. watAgame takes pride in delivering a safe, creative and entertaining concept to girls worldwide, please visit www.watagame.com.
please visit our portfolipdescription of Watagame.
Please visit The Guardian (UK), Børsen (DK), and Business.dk and Invest In Denmark for articles regarding the investment.
For further information, please contact
Lars Andersen, (Partner) SEED Capital
E-mail: la@seedcapital.dk
Phone: +45 45256153