RockYou operates an in-game video advertising platform that delivers targeted video ads within games. Founded in 2005 and based in San Francisco, the company is led by CEO Lisa Marino. Its platform currently delivers over 1 billion impressions a month. Over the past 12 months RockYou expanded its games portfolio with titles acquired from Disney (Kitchen Scramble, Words of Wonder, City Girl, Gardens of Time) and Kabam (the Facebook and web versions of Kingdoms of Camelot and Dragons of Atlantis). The company plans to use new funding to grow and diversify its audience through partnerships with established game developers and to further expand its mobile offerings. RockYou has shifted from social-game development to operating as a mobile-game publisher and in-game ad network, acquiring aging social and mobile titles rather than developing original games. The company has bought around a dozen apps and games over the past year to assemble a premium game inventory. Those acquisitions have grown its gamer network to roughly 75 million players. RockYou says it has more than doubled revenue year-over-year. The core product is the company’s video ad inventory and the player network it can offer to marketers. Management plans to use new capital to fund further acquisitions to bolster appeal with brands and expand its ad reach. RockYou develops and acquires social networking and mobile applications and operates an advertising platform that serves ads to its own and third-party apps. The company works with game developers throughout Asia to monetize, license, and publish games globally and has been expanding its presence through a joint venture, RockYou Asia, which builds social and mobile entertainment apps including RockYou Battle Monsters, Umajin RockYou, Usaru Biyori, Crime World, Hug Me, and Speed Racing. RockYou says there are 280 million monthly users of apps it owns directly or has advertising relationships with. In the latest financing, SoftBank invested $10 million and RockYou acquired a majority of the shares in RockYou Asia. This latest investment follows a $50 million raise last November and brings RockYou's total funding to $127 million. The company previously suffered a data breach that exposed over 32 million user accounts and was hit with a class action lawsuit over security practices. RockYou builds and acquires social networking applications and operates an ad platform that serves ads to its own and third-party apps. The company also pursues in-game offers and is experimenting with paid user engagement like watching/responding to videos and nonprofit partnerships. RockYou reports 213 million monthly users across apps it owns or has advertising relationships with. It plans product launches such as a MySpace virtual goods app called Gifts By RockYou. Financially, the company has reported rumored revenues of $30–$40 million per year. RockYou launched in November 2005 and has raised significant venture capital to fuel growth. RockYou builds social-networking widgets and applications for platforms like Facebook and OpenSocial. Its widgets are seen by 87.5 million people per month across the web and generate about 2.7 billion pageviews monthly, which it monetizes by selling social-networking advertising against that inventory. RockYou's OpenSocial applications have been installed 10 million times. The company faces intense competition with Slide, with rapid feature copying and a 'brutal' rivalry shaping product focus. The immediate operational challenge noted in the article is improving ad engagement — getting more people to click on its ads. Financially, RockYou has raised $51.5 million to date, including the newly announced round.

Total raised

$138M

Funding rounds

6

Latest round

Equity

Latest activity

Mar 2015