Bunchball offers online "gamification" solutions through its Nitro platform. Nitro enables businesses to track and reward participation across websites, mobile applications and social media by creating gamified experiences intended to increase loyalty and revenues. The company works with major brands and media companies, including Warner Bros., Comcast, USA Network, LiveOps and Hasbro. Founded in February 2005 and led by CEO Jim Scullion, Bunchball is headquartered in San Jose, CA. The company plans to use new funding to invest in product development, marketing and sales and to expand into B2B, loyalty and incentive market segments. Most recently it raised $6.5M in financing. Bunchball collects behavioral data from games on social networks and uses it to build games and virtual worlds for media properties such as The Office. Its Nitro platform matches social-network behavior with media-site metrics and applies “rules” to encourage desired actions via points, levels, leaderboards, challenges and virtual goods. The company licenses Nitro to large media clients including NBC, CBS and Lifetime and charges based on tiers such as API-call volume; it also sells for-pay modules like a virtual rooms feature. Bunchball monetizes through game services, advertising within social networks, and enabling media companies to sell branded swag and sponsorships. The Office site exceeded NBC’s target of 10,000–15,000 users by attracting more than 200,000 users, over 80% of whom are active. The company is based in Redwood City, Calif., and also operates cross-network games and a single gamer identity and virtual-currency system for use across sites. Bunchball operates a site hosting multiplayer Adobe Flash games for social networks, blogs and other websites. Its catalog emphasizes retro-style multiplayer titles; examples in the article include N-blox Evil Edition (a 2-player Tetris-style game) and Sea Battle (a Battleship-style multiplayer game). The company’s multiplayer features were highlighted as a way to promote deeper interaction between players on social networks such as MySpace. Adobe and San Francisco-based Granite Ventures provided a $2 million investment in Bunchball. That investment was made through a limited partnership called Adobe Ventures. The founders are Rajat Paharia and Sunil Singh.

Total raised

$13M

Funding rounds

3

Latest round

Equity

Latest activity

Jun 2011