Dots Spins Out Of Betaworks With $10M Series A From Tencent, GreyCroft

Dots, the mobile gaming studio responsible for two dead-simple but beautiful games, is today announcing the close of a $10 million round, as well as the official spinout of Dots as its own company, separate from betaworks.

The Series A round is co-led by Greycroft Partners and Tencent, which Dots cofounder and CEO Paul Murphy reminded TechCrunch is the largest gaming company in the world based on revenue. Other investors include Northzone Venture, Crunchfund, and other angels.

“We’ve seen profitability in the last six months, but we look out and see the other big gaming studios and we know we can do better,” said Murphy. “The financing is going to allow us to grow beyond our revenues while the market is growing so rapidly.”

Dots was created by Patrick Moberg and launched as part of an EIR program at betaworks, which is an inexplicable hybrid of startup studio and accelerator, led by John Borthwick. The game launched back in May of 2013 alongside companies like Poncho and Giphy, and has since gone on to be relatively successful as a gaming studio. Not only was Dots a huge hit in the press and with users, getting one million users in a week after launch, but the company was prepared to launch a sequel.

After launching for iPad and offering multiplayer support to Dots, the sequel TwoDots joined its predecessor in the App Store about a year later, in May of this year. Combined, both games account for more than 45 million global users.

Murphy tells TechCrunch that Dots has grown to 25 people with two new games under development. There’s no word on release date for either, but May doesn’t seem like a bad guess.

*Michael Arrington runs CrunchFund and also founded TechCrunch. No Arrington was involved in the making of this story.