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December 09, 2006
Silicon Valley VC Invests $31M In Famous Scottish Games Dev Team
Your a:c euro reporter just got back from the Scottish Tech Tour (the body is back at least) to hear the news that New Enterprise Associates, a 30 year old Silicon Valley VC giant, has put $31M into Dundee, Scotland-based Realtime Worlds, an independent games development company, whose founding team created the Grand Theft Auto video game. (Disclosure: the a:c euro's accomodation on the tour was sponsored by The European Tech Tour Assoc.)
Realtime Worlds sold an undisclosed amount of equity to NEA in order to invest in its "global centre of excellence" for games development and to staff it up (image right).
The investment in the four year old company comes in advance of the launch of its Crackdown title, to be released in 2007 and published by Microsoft Game Studios for the Xbox 360 platform. Another game, All Points Bulletin, a massively multiplayer online game, will be published for the PC and for Xbox 360 by Korean online games giant Webzen.
This deal is interesting because we just learned that the Grand Theft Auto franchise is one of the examples of Scotland's claim to being a world class tech location. Indeed, according to NEA, the Grand Theft Auto and Lemmings games franchises generated some ...
$2.5B in revenues worldwide... Who knew it was a Scottish team behind it - we didn't until Thurday.
But NEA's investment in Realtime is also interesting for another reason, it is yet another example of a trend that sees brand name US VCs investing in European tech companies.
And the fact that NEA invested alone adds one more deal to a list that is blowing the notion that the US VCs are only co-investing in later stage ventures with local partners.
Other US VCs that have completed similar deals include Highland Capital (France's Photoways' Series A round), Sequoia (Austria's JaJah's seed round), GRP Capital (France's Actimagine Series A round) and Baker Capital (Finland's DigiTV Series A round).
Realtime Worlds was founded by CEO and creative director David Jones who was one of the co-founders of DMA Design, the games dev firm that spawned the Grand Theft Auto franchise.
As we learned last week in an intense two and a half days of presentations and meetings with Scottish entrepreneurs and their supporters in castles, chapels, research centers, airplane hangers, Edinburgh's City Hall chambers, and universities, not to mention the stretch Hummers and the whisky distellery, when Scottish investors and economic development execs trot out recent examples of the country's capacity to spawn world-class and high-growth tech, they list the Grand Theft Auto company DMA Design, the cloning of Dolly the sheep at the Roslin BioCentre, eye diagnostics firm Optos, and Wolfson Microelectronics whose market cap is well over a $1B.
The other claims to fame that Scotland has are much older and sexier, the TV, the telephone, the photocopier, hypodermic needles, antiseptics and anaesthetics, and interferon type I (although Amercians may disagree with some of those claims).
Read - Realtime Worlds Receives Financing From New Enterprise Associates (press rel.)
Posted on December 9, 2006 05:33 PM | Posted to Games (PC and other) | News And Updates | Permalink
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