One of Japan’s most famous independent venture capital firms, Infinity Venture Partners (IVP), seems to have a big interest in the social gaming space and China. IVP already has a number of startups with this profile in their portfolio, and today it came to light they’ll intensify the relationship with one of them through a capital injection: Rekoo Media [CN].
IVP is ready to invest $1.5 million in Rekoo, which is headquartered in China but also has a subsidiary in Japan since October. Rekoo Japan’s CEO, Ono Hiroshi, is one of the three partners at IVP. Akio Tanaka, another IVP partner and the only one based in China, will join the board of directors at Rekoo in China.
Rekoo caused a sensation in Japan’s web landscape with its Farmville-type social game Sunshine Ranch, which attracted two million users in less than two months after Mixi (Japan’s No. 1 social network) opened their platform to third-party app developers in August this year.
Sunshine Ranch (click to enlarge the screenshot above) is still by far the most popular Mixi app and now has over 3.8 million users, meaning it managed to draw in more than 20% of all Mixi users. The game is very successful on Facebook, too. Not bad for a company that just launched early last year.
Via CNET Japan [JP]
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