Wonderhill announces $7 million financing for social game venture
WonderHill announced its entry into the casual social game industry, and unveiled details about its management team and a $7 million Series A financing by Charles River Ventures and Shasta Ventures. With a team of talented industry veterans, WonderHill could provide serious competition for casual game leaders Zynga, Playfish and top-dog Pogo.
WonderHill is led by Web veterans James Currier (CEO) and Stan Chudnovsky (CTO), who have teamed up to build several exponential growth Web businesses in the last nine years, including Tickle.com. Currier has been developing online entertainment businesses since 1991, and has sat on the board of Directors of SecondLife since 2005.
Currier and Chudnovsky have been joined by Chief Creative Officer Nick Rush, the former Chief Creative Officer of Pogo, of Electronic Arts Online, and the former VP Creative of iWin. Rush is well known as the creator of many of the Internet’s most popular casual games including Word Whomp! and Poppit!, which remain the top games on Pogo. He also created Club Pogo, the most successful casual game subscription service in the world. At iWin from 2004-2008, Nick helped manage the creative on the triple-A downloadable franchises Jewel Quest, Mah Jong Quest, JoJo’s Fashion Show and Family Feud Online Party. In the late 1990′s, Nick was VP Product at Berkeley Systems and the creative force behind the famous Flying Toasters screen saver line. He also collaborated on the classic “You Don’t Know Jack” online casual game. Because of his depth and consistency, Rush has become known as the “John Lassiter of online casual gaming,” a reference to one of the two founders of Pixar.
“WonderHill’s executive team uniquely combines top viral Web talent with top game talent, and that will bring something new and valuable to the game industry,” said Saar Gur of Charles River Ventures, a WonderHill investor. “This is a mature team of people who have shown they can do it again and again. They are metrics driven in a way few teams are.”
Tod Francis, Co-Founder of Shasta Ventures, said, “When we saw WonderHill, we felt we had the opportunity to invest in what could be the Pixar of online gaming. This team knows how to attract talent and build a lasting culture. And they understand quality, which we believe is key to winning in this market.”
Said James Currier, CEO, “WonderHill will be building casual games with a magical design style and cooperative game play. The target audience is people over 30. Nick Rush’s experience at Pogo and our experience at Tickle showed us that our natural tendency is to make uplifting, wholesome entertainment for people, and we also learned there is a vast market for it.”
“There are plenty of violent, edgy, competitive games out there. That’s not what we do. Our games focus on cooperation, communication, creativity, nurturing, and making the world a better place,” said Nick Rush.
A WonderHill preview site is available at www.wonderhill.com.
About WonderHill WonderHill is an online casual games company that will develop wholesome, uplifting games on MySpace, Facebook, iPhone, and WonderHill’s own website. WonderHill is based in downtown San Francisco and is backed with $7 million from Charles River Ventures and Shasta Ventures. The company competes with companies such as Zynga, Playfish, and Pogo. WonderHill is a spinout of technology greenhouse Ooga Labs, and is hiring.
