PlayFirst was founded in 2004 and includes such titles as Diner Dash, Cooking Dash, Wedding Dash, as well as Chocolatier and Dream Chronicles, with the “Dash” triumvirate of games clocking in over 100 million play sessions to date. The company plans on using the financing to bolster its social and mobile gaming thrust, like just about everyone else in the entire sector is doing at the moment.

Along with the financing, PlayFirst also announced that former PlaySpan Chief Marketing Officer and Harvard MBA Eric Hartness will join the San Francisco based startup as general manager of social games, Loomia’s Matt Levy will be coming on as Chief Architect and Playdom’s Lars Berg will be joining as senior product manager.

The company currently publishes games for the PC, Mac, iPhone, Facebook and console platforms but is looking to expand, says PlayFirst president Mari Baker:

“We will continue to aggressively optimize the PlayFirst brands that consumers love, like Diner Dash, to social and mobile platforms and look for growth through partnerships and potential acquisitions.”

Earlier this year, the startup inked a major deal with Big Fish Games and today it has announced that social game industry executive Mitali Pattnaik has joined PlayFirst as General Manager, Social Games.

Pattnaik started her career at Microsoft at the beginning of the millennium, and joined Electronic Arts as Marketing Manager after a four-year stint at the software company. She didn’t stick around for long: she was hired by Yahoo in September 2005 to fill the role of Senior Marketing Manager, where she oversaw worldwide marketing for Yahoo! Search.

Most recently, she led the marketing and monetization efforts for social gaming at Electronic Arts, where she returned as Online Marketing Manager and later, Head of Marketing, in April 2008 before leaving the company for the second time around late last year. In her new role at PlayFirst, she will lead all company’s social gaming initiatives, including the development and publishing of games for Facebook and other social platforms.

PlayFirst’s chief executive, on a sidenote, is also a woman. The company is led by Mari Baker, former Executive in Residence at Kleiner Perkins and founding CEO of KPCB/Sequoia-backed Navigenics.

(Photo from Facebook)

San Francisco based PlayFirst was founded in 2004 and is focused on creating “shared casual game experiences around lasting original brands” that includes game play “rich in story and character.” PlayFirst titles include Wedding Dash, Chocolatier, and Dream Chronicles.

Accompanying news of the funding was a new deal between PlayFirst and RockYou. Under the deal RockYou will distribute PlayFirst games through its widget and social networking service, with Wedding Dash the first title to be made available to Facebook users. PlayFirst sees the deal a way of tapping into the growing popularity of social networking sites as a gaming platform. According to PlayFirst, Wedding Dash has so far been downloaded 200 million times by users on PC, Mac, mobile and handheld platforms.