Adobe Starting to Dole Out Cash?
I’m confused about this, but I wanted to highlight it because it’s very important to Flash, and I’m hoping someone out there knows a bit more than I do. I saw today via Mashable that Bunchball, a Flash game company, raised $2 million dollars in venuture funding. Taken by itself, it’s great to see more companies using Flash technology get funding for making the web a more interactive place. But the interestin part is in who led the funding round:
The Bay Area-based company raised the funds from Granite Ventures and Adobe Ventures, having previously received an angel round.
At first I thought this was the very first instance of money being given out by the $100,000,000 fund announced at MAX. I knew that Adobe had done venture deals before that, but when you google “Adobe Ventures” the Adobe page comes up 404.
The other company in the round, Granite Ventures, is listed in the second spot of the Google search above, so the Granite/Adobe relationship seems to be a pre-existing one (they are lilsted as strategic partners). So is this one of the last investments by Adobe Ventures? Is Adobe Ventures going to continue to exist, but the $100,000,000 fund set aside to focus on Apollo will be separate?
I’m hoping to talk to Adobe about the VC fund announcement later this week, so that may shed some light on this, but I thought it was interesting news.
[tags]Bunchball, Adobe, Adobe Ventures, Flash[/tags]
Posted in Rich Internet Applications
October 30th, 2006 at 10:41 pm
Somewhat related to your post, Bunch Ball has promise because it solves a niche problem a lot of us Flash / Flex devs have.
The need for a no-hassle & inexpensive, multi-user server.
Building games for a community based on Flash all centered around a single account is great. Shockwave.com and Atom Films sort of did this, but not with a solid, single experience. Gary Rosenzweig(sp?) had something similiar, but his site was a bunch of games with no accounts, no singular entry point, with a scattered community.
When I saw an early build of Bunch Ball, I was impressed with the idea: Any Flash dev can easily tap into an XMLSocket, for free… AND make dough? Huh? Awesome!
The vision seemed kind of large, though, almost overreaching. I’m glad for their president the investors didn’t agree with me.
If Flash Media Server was cheaper for using the real-time data specifically, I bet you more initiatives like this would spawn… hell, maybe even Bunch Ball would of used FMS instead of XMLSocket!
Good on Bunch Ball, and spread the bling!!!
October 31st, 2006 at 12:45 am
I’ve seen some jobpostings on the FlashGameCoders list two months ago announcing that they received funding and were looking for Flash Game Developers (with AS3 and Flex experience which was what obviously caught my interest )
October 31st, 2006 at 12:53 am
Hey Ryan -
Adobe’s investment in Bunchball has been in the works for some time, and the first I heard of the $100 million for Apollo companies was when I saw the MAX announcement. That said, we’re very excited about Apollo and the opportunity to put social gaming on the desktop. And I have no idea what internal account Adobe’s investment came out of
I’ll find out more.
JesterXL – We’ve changed the business a LOT since you last took a look at Bunchball. We’re currently focused on “social gaming”, providing multi-player casual gaming as a hosted service to social networks, personals sites, and communities of all sizes. We enable site members to quickly and seamlessly start and play games with each other without leaving the host site, increasing retention and stickiness. And we’ve made integration a snap.
So we’re currently what you’d call a b2b2c company – we provide social gaming services to sites, which they provide to their visitors & members. We’re currently not trying to create our own destination site – http://www.bunchball.com is largely for demo purposes at the moment, and doesn’t showcase the full range of integration options.
This is in stark contrast to earlier models we explored around widgets, our own destination site and providing an open platform for Flash devs to build on. We still plan to support the open platform in the future, but for now we are developing our own content and working with select partners.
Let me know if either of you want a quick demo sometime.
btw – we’re growing our team and are looking for a hotshot Flash developer and a creative director: http://www.bunchball.com/about/jobs.html
best, – rajat
October 31st, 2006 at 6:27 am
Hi Ryan,
Adobe Ventures has been around for a while and made many investments over the years. We invest together with other high quality VC firms, such as Granite. The $100M fund that we announced is an extension of that effort. Run by the same (great) team in Adobe Ventures.
I think they will put up some more info on the site soon (FAQ about the new $100M fund, etc.).
HTH,
David
Adobe
October 31st, 2006 at 7:47 am
Its interesting that BunchBall has “Apollo” in their Job description for a “Client Software Engineer”.
October 31st, 2006 at 11:39 am
Thanks Rajat and David,
I had thought that Adobe Ventures was being discontinued and a new entity (still inside Adobe) would be investing the allotted $100 million. Good to see that Adobe Ventures is still running the show and that the partnership with Granite seems to be in tact.
David, I’ve been in touch with PR, but if you have any other on the record comments with more info about the fund, I’d love to hear them. I’m hoping to set up a post over on ZDNet about the announcement and answer some of the questions that have been floating around.
Renaun, is this the first instance of Apollo on a resume? Seems like it might be close.
October 31st, 2006 at 1:19 pm
Adobe venture fund info
Adobe venture fund info: At MAX Adobe announced it would be doing $100 million in venture funding of projects which enrich the Adobe Engagement Platform. The immediate question was, of course and en masse, “How can I get some of that!?” I don’t have…
November 15th, 2006 at 7:06 am
Ciao
my 2 cents: Flash Games->Flash Lite->Verizon?!
(beside the other technologies!)
Alessandro