Founded in 2008, PapayaMobile has been on a track to becoming a global mobile social network and gaming platform. The Beijing-based company announced raising a $4m round of funding from DCM that it will use to continue their expansion from US and Europe into these Chinese market, get more developers on board and continue development of social and mobile gaming applications. In addition, PapayaMobile has announced the release of their Papaya Social SDK that will allow Android developers to build, distribute and monetize games for free.
PapayaMobile currently has over 3.5 million global users through mobile game launches that provide cross platform functionality. The company hopes to gain more traction by opening up its platform to third party developers. Papaya Social SDK will allow developers to plugin Papay’s social network for free, creating opportunities for developers to cross promote their app to Papaya’s userbase. In addition, developers will be able to add social features like leaderboards, achievements, friend lists and more.
“PapayaMobile uniquely intersects two of the hottest growth sectors today: mobile gaming and social networking,” said DCM General Partner, Hurst Lin. “Because Android provides the most open environment today, PapayaMobile’s platform uniquely offers game developers instant access to users and monetization that can jumpstart their viral growth.”
PapayaMobile has targeted Android due to its fast growth in the international market and feels that their offerings and future product expansions will allow both existing social game developers and upstarts to reach a massive audience quickly.
Papaya has another offering that it says can help reduce customer acquisition costs by 60-80 percent called Papaya Offer SDK, a pay-per-install advertising system. Together both services should provide a great deal of benefit to developers that want a kick-start without having to allocate a large marketing budget.
“As a former Google product manager, I’ve always believed the best way to serve users and the market is to create open technologies and platforms, and this has been PapayaMobile’s focus. Our release of Social SDK and Offer SDK will provide benefit and added growth to the Android ecosystem,” said Si Shen, CEO of PapayaMobile. “The company is already profitable, and with our recent $4M series A funding from DCM, we know we will successfully enable the next generation of social gaming applications. Someday, we hope to see “mobile Zynga” and “mobile Playfish” on Papaya.”
The investment from DCM is a smart choice as DCM has made other notable investments in gaming companies like Playfish, Outspark and RockYou through which PapayaMobile could gain synergy.
