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May 20, 2007
FatFooGoo Virtual Goods Platform Seed-funded And Aims For €10M First Round
FatFooGoo, an online marketplace for virtual goods from a couple of Austrian serial entrepreneurs, is to launch this summer on the back of a seed funding round, according to the Austrian press this weekend. Plans are afoot to raise €10M in venture capital to establish an international reach.
What's next a spot market in Gpotatos (flyff), Inter Stellar Kredits (EVE Online), and Linden dollars (second life)?
We don't know but we translated and summarized the reports about FatFooGoo below.
The baroquely named FatFoogoo is a timely idea.
There's no doubt that gamers, virtual world visitors, and chatters are willing to pay real money for pixel-based hats, daggers, guns, and sofas.
Even underage kids are into buying this stuff. Since PayPal requires account holders to be over 18, moms that have PayPal are now more popular than moms with a 7-seater minivan at 6am on a Saturday soccer morning.
Whether or not the games publishers and virtual world operators will support an independent online exchange is another question.
It is something that the startup is counting on, according to the Austrian press. FatFoogoo says it will work with games operators and payment platforms like Paypal to manage payments, audit it, and expedite transactions in exchange for a 15 percent fee. It is also going to offer editing tools for users to create their characters and accessories, which is smart.
The founders, Martin Herdina and Daniel Petri, have weathered the hype and the reality of the European mobile messaging, coming out the other side with the a desire to do something new.
The two were executives at ucp morgen, founded back in 1999 by Christian Lutz. It was an Austrian/Swiss mobile payments and messaging startup (sms.at, uboot.com) that readers who were here during the last venture cycle will remember.
For those that don't - the company raised three rounds of VC totalling €42M, grew to more than 200 employees. It shrunk when it had to live on cashflow and subsequently sold its consumer portals to two different buyers and then merged its billing and backend software biz with Qpass in 2005 - the combined company was acquired by Amdoc for $275M last year.
Current backers include ucp co-founder Christian Lutz, Christian 'Toto' Wolff (the Austrian rally race car driver whose investment firm march.fifteen backed ucp and Jowood, the games publisher), as well Michael Krammer, the former eplus and tele.ring executive.
The amount raised to seed the venture was "more than one million euros", say the reports. Fatfoogoo (we feel silly writing that name) plans to raise a whopping €10M in its first VC round and will target US investors that can help them get into deals with large Internet companies, the press reports say.
The exit is already planned: a trade sale a la ucp.
Read - Das reale Geschäft mit virtuellen Gütern: Digitale Gegenstände um echtes Geld kaufen (networld.at)
Read - "eBay" für virtuelle Güter (kurier.at)
Posted on May 20, 2007 09:54 PM | Posted to News And Updates | Permalink
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