Knowledge Adventure, a developer of educational games for children, has announced that it has raised $5m VC in a series B round led by Azure Capital and TeleSoft Partners. It intends to use the money to finance a shift from CD-based educational games to 3D virtual worlds.
According to Arjun Gupta, founder and managing partner at TeleSoft Partners, the kids' virtual worlds space is worth about a hundred million dollars, with the potential to grow into a multi-billion dollar industry within a few years. There's not much disputing that: kids virtual worlds have been by far the most successful sector in the industry, with growth that shows no signs of abating. The high profile successes of games like Club Penguin, which sold to Disney for $700m also show the potential for a healthy exit for VCs.
Winning the support of both parents and children for your virtual world is a key goal for companies in the space; if parents can be persuaded to encourage their children to play in a virtual world, and children to want to play in the virtual world, then a virtuous cycle is created. Knowledge Adventure could be in a good position to achieve this, given its history in the education space, and the educational slant it is giving to its virtual worlds. JumpStart, announced recently, is an educational 3D virtual world, for example. Further virtual world products are coming in the fourth quarter.
"JumpStart has a rich history as the leading brand in delivering learning games to kids over the last 20 years," said Knowledge Adventure president & CEO David Lord. "By leveraging our trusted brand with parents to deliver a rich, safe and fun virtual world experience for kids 3 to 10, we see countless opportunity for the company to bring our unique adventure-based learning games to the explosive virtual world/online gaming market."
0 comments