Capturing kids’ attention can be expensive.
Roblox has spent the greater part of the millennium creating a cool place for kids to play a diverse collection of games inside a single cross-platform world for its huge audience of tens of millions of monthly active youngsters.
The company announced Tuesday that it has closed a massive $92 million funding round led by Meritech Capital Partners and Index Ventures. The company has now raised just over $102 million in total funding to date.
Things have been moving rather quickly as of late for the social gaming startup founded in 2005. The company recently announced it has more than 48 million monthly active users on the site, with about half of that traffic coming from U.S. users. The company announced in December that user growth was at 30 million MAUs, so growth has been fervent in 2017 so far.
“Roblox’s growth over the past two years has been one of the best-kept secrets in the industry,” Meritech managing director Craig Sherman said in a statement. “They’re experiencing engagement and audience numbers that rival some of the world’s biggest gaming and entertainment companies and we see the trajectory continuing to accelerate. This is an exciting time to come on board.”
Roblox is pretty unique in just how young its large user base is, with children between the ages of 6-16 composing the largest chunk of the site’s users. Roblox is available across a wide swath of platforms, including desktops, smartphones, consoles and a variety of virtual reality platforms.
If you’re first thought from this headline is that this is a hell of a lot of money, you’re not wrong. Roblox may have visual fidelity that’s about as basic as Minecraft, but it’s the game platform’s customizability through creative tools that is allowing developers to go wild in building cool content for users.
Roblox Studio is a bit like a more simplistic version of Unity, though the more than 22 million games that have been created using the service have to be accessed directly through the Roblox portal. This isn’t just some toy though; developers are making serious money capitalizing on the young and dedicated user base. Roblox just had to rework its pay structure to allow some of its most popular developers to earn up to $140,000 per month from the company.
As the company looks to become more of a household name, they’re expanding into a line of retail toys featuring their LEGO-like characters, which you can buy right now at places like Toys “R” Us.