Rounds, a social video and gaming application, has raised $3 million in new funding led by Verizon Investments with Rhodium and DFJ’s Tim Draper participating. This brings the company’s total funding to $5.5 million.
Rounds offers online experiences that mimic real-life personal encounters. Users can play with fun webcam effects, collaboratively watch YouTube videos, play multi-user interactive games, draw on whiteboards, send virtual gifts to one another, write texts and browse websites together, all in a single environment. The free service already boasts more than three million users from around the world and more than 650,000 daily Rounds sessions.
The Rounds platform currently offers over 20 different games and activities. The company also debuted an API (launched in May 2010) that enables third-party developers to create additional games and experiences.
The new funding will be used to extend its web-based ”communitainment” platform beyond its popular Facebook application to other consumer social networks as well as mobile devices. The investment will also be used to develop more premium games and activities.
As the web’s first social “hangout network,” Rounds combines online entertainment with video communication to bring friends and like-minded people closer together for a fun, live experience across social networks, operating systems and devices. Bridging the offline and online worlds, Rounds uses shared activities, games and video to give friends the feeling of hanging out in real life. An interactive stream of friends’ and featured users’ “captured moments” from live sessions gives hangouts an afterlife, creating a new social...
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