Badgeville founder and CEO Kris Duggan is one of those people that is so ridiculously upbeat and positive all the time that sometimes you just want to strangle him. No one has a right to be that happy.
He was smiling and happy when I met him at the Fortune Brainstorm conference a year ago and he showed me Badgeville for the first time. He was happy on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francsico last September while launching his company and taking the audience choice award.
And now he’s a whole new level of happy because he just closed a second round of financing – $12 million from Norwest Venture Partners and El Dorado Ventures, with participation from previous investors Trinity Ventures and Webb Investment Network. Tim Chang from Norwest and Tom Peterson from El Dorado joined the company’s board of directors.
When Duggan isn’t overdosing on dopamine (or perhaps while he is), he’s growing one heck of a company. Badgeville provides game mechanics to websites, giving incentives to users to interact more with those sites. They have 75 announced paying customers, “seven figure” quarterly revenue and are growing that revenue at 40% quarter over quarter. Customers pay a yearly fee for the service. Customers include Discovery Communications, NBC, Bluefly.com, Interscope Records, Major League Gaming, LiveMocha, The Active Network, and Deloitte Digital.
Chang from Norwest is a particularly good fit for the company. He’s invested in both ngmoco and Playdom, and understand game mechanics well. He’s also invested in BranchOut, that startup that you keep seeing in your email inbox as people add you to their network.
Here’s that infographic I mentioned in the title.
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