GameSalad announced a new round of funding yesterday, and the news got picked up by our very own Austin American Statesman, as well as TechCrunch.We wrote about their A round funding last year. Back in 2009 your humble editor picked them to debut in the Innotech Beta Summit, next to other great companies such as InfoChimps, Spredfast, and PetsMD.
The company, which empowers aspiring and established game designers to easily develop casual games, today announced that it has raised $6.1 million in a second round of funding, led by Steamboat Ventures, with participation from Greycroft Partners, DFJ Mercury, DFJ Frontier and ff Asset Management. The new financing will be used to grow GameSalad’s technical and product teams and further develop the popular game creation technology to expand the company’s footprint in web and mobile games.
“We are focused on growing GameSalad into a world-class gaming company,” said Steve Felter, CEO of GameSalad. ”By making game creation accessible to anyone with a passion for games, we’ve empowered a new breed of game designers through GameSalad. We’ll continue to build on this momentum in 2011 and unveil some exciting new technologies that will bring people together through the creation, sharing and playing of games.”
In conjunction with the latest financing round, Beau Laskey, managing director at Steamboat Ventures, has joined GameSalad’s board of directors alongside existing director Blair Garrou from DFJ Mercury, who led the company’s initial seed round. Dana Settle, partner at Greycroft Partners, joins as a board observer.
“We are thrilled to partner with such an exciting company and talented leadership team,” said Laskey. “We believe that GameSalad’s disruptive technology is creating an entirely new set of opportunities for game enthusiasts. By putting powerful creative tools in the hands of anyone who wants to make games, GameSalad is changing the way people interact with entertainment.”
GameSalad is the largest game development tool for Apple’s iOS devices. With GameSalad, game makers can rapidly design, publish and distribute original games for the iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Web without needing to write a line of code. To date, GameSalad’s free-to-use, drag-and-drop game creation platform has been used to create over 8,500 games, including more than 30 top 100 U.S. Games in Apple’s App Store.