Madrid, Spain-based eRepublik, makers of what the startup refers to as a ‘massive online social strategy game’ (MOSS), has just raised €2 million – approx. $2.8 million – in Series A funding from AGF Private Equity. The company had previously raised up to €750,000 in seed funding from the VC firm and a host of angel investors, bringing the total invested to €2.75 million or a little over $3.8 million.
eRepublik, its first MOSS, is set in a browser-based mirrored version of the real world in which players (called citizens) can participate in politics, set economic policy, start businesses, engage in wars with other countries and interact socially with other players while they’re at it.
It’s Elevator Pitch Friday, which means another startup has created a video that’s worth showing you. This week’s presentation comes from eRepublik, a Spanish startup that wants to take strategy games and make them more social, more interactive, and therefore, more fun.
eRepublik wants to change the way that strategy games are played by taking out the hours of game play. Anyone who has played Risk or Diplomacy knows how long traditional strategy games can take. eRupublik has built an online virtual geo-political simulator that allows the player to “make history” in its virtual world with as little as fifteen minutes of daily game play. And, it is both free and completely browser based, two things that most strategy games are not.
Madrid, Spain based startup Erepublik is aiming to make its mark in the online gaming community with a model that combines MMOG and social network.
At its core, Erepublik is a massive online multiplayer social strategy that aims to be intricate and accelerated enough “to attract a spectrum of both fanatical and casual gamers.” Players can be politicians, soldiers, entrepreneurs or journalists in different countries, and much of the environment is user generated. The game is still in invite only beta testing, but has 10,000 beta testers from 43 countries currently playing the game. A key pitch of Erupblik is the time required to play the game: 14 minutes a day.
Erepublik’s business model is based on a mixture of the sale of virtual goods, and advertising.
Erepublik has taken €200,000 in angel funding to date and is in the process of closing a further €550,000 round. Management includes CEO Alexis Bonte from lastminute.com and CTO George Lemnaru from Tevin Solutions.
It wont appeal to hard core gamers but that’s not the target market; a time poor MySpace/ Facebook generation who prefers their gaming less full on seems to be the target. It will be interesting to see how it grows in the coming year once it fully opens to the public.
Madrid, Spain-based eRepublik, makers of what the startup refers to as a ‘massive online social strategy game’ (MOSS), has just raised €2 million – approx. $2.8 million – in Series A funding from AGF Private Equity. The company had previously raised up to €750,000 in seed funding from the VC firm and a host of angel investors, bringing the total invested to €2.75 million or a little over $3.8 million.
