Funding
worldwidegames GmbH, developer of the game portal playnik.com, has received €500,000 venture capital from the High-Tech Gründerfonds. This funding was co-financed by Oliver Jung, Torsten Oppermann and Holtzbrink Ventures.
The money will finance the development of new games and gaming concepts and support expansion into major foreign markets. Agreements have already been made with a number of partners elsewhere in Europe, including the Spil Group and the Scandinavian Sanoma Group. A US partnership is imminent.
“We expect fast growth in the browser gaming market and are confident that playnik will be able to position itself successfully within this market,“ said investment manager Björn Momsen, explaining why High-Tech Gründerfonds decided to invest in the Hamburg-based company.
“People who play browser games are principally interested in interacting with other players, both teammates and opponents. The portal’s innovative community features address precisely this need – this is a concept that has convinced us”.
playnik.com offers a combination of novel gaming features alongside social networking functions. “playnik is positioning itself as a perfect symbiosis between innovative gaming features and state-of-the-art social community functionality. We are the one-stop shop for fans of browser games”, said managing director Malte Paul.
High-Tech Gründerfonds is a public private partnership with €272 million under managment. Investors include the Federal Ministry for Economics and Technology, the KfW bank group, BASF, Deutsche Telekom, Siemens, Robert Bosch, Daimler and Carl Zeiss.
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