Pluto Games, a mobile ‘edutainment’ platform for kids, has raised $500,000 in seed funding from incubator YouWeb and angel investors including co-founder and chairman of Silver Lake Dave Roux; Brett Wander, Chief Investment Officer at Charles Schwab; and Praful Shah, former VP Marketing at WebEx. As part of the investment, Pluto Games is spinning off from YouWeb as an independent company.
founded by Luis Sampedro, Pluto offers an educational game and iPad app, called Pluto Leans Piano that combines scrolling gameplay dynamics with musical notes to get children interested in learning music. The game follows the main character, Pluto, a penguin on a quest to master a variety of songs on the Piano. Children can learn basic songs like Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star as well as more classical pieces like The Magic Flute by Mozart, Ode to Joy by Beethoven, Swan Lake by Tchaikovsky.
Pluto Plays Piano is free to download and play with stars awarded based on performance in completing levels. As the player collects stars, Pluto unlocks new songs to learn. The company plans to launch music and education tablet games in other verticals soon.
YouWeb entrepreneurs spend a year coming up with ideas, building technologies and products, and launching their own companies - typically in consumer internet and mobile computing sectors. Created by Peter Relan, a successful serial entrepreneur, Silicon Valley executive, angel investor and technology veteran for over 20 years, YouWeb works with the best and brightest young technical talent in the industry to create new products and business models.
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