Greycroft is getting even bigger.
The Los Angeles and New York firm announced Tuesday it closed two new funds: Greycroft VI, a $310 million venture fund with an emphasis on early-stage investments, as well as Greycroft Growth III, a new growth-stage fund with more than $368 million in commitments.
As one of the earlier VC firms in Los Angeles and one of the few with a war chest large enough to write checks for later rounds of up to $50 million, Greycroft has boomed in the last 14 years. The firm has gone from raising $75 million to $2 billion in capital.
<p>Its portfolio now spans 60 companies with $100 million-plus valuations, including nine "unicorns" valued at more than a billion dollars, including electric scooter company Bird, the dating site Bumble and video gamer-maker Scopely, which Greycroft infused with $200 million of follow-on capital this spring. </p><p>Greycroft also invested in the fashion resale site The <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/quote/REAL:US" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">RealReal</a>, which went public last year in a $2.4 billion exit. </p><p>"Greycroft partners with entrepreneurs along their journey, providing capital and expertise to support their vision from seed funding to exit," Greycroft co-founder Ian Sigalow said in a prepared statement.</p>
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Mark Terbeek is a leading B2B investor and on the board of Scopely, Icertis and more. On this episode of L.A. Venture , he shares his current investment theses and explains how Greycroft operates as a seed-to-growth-stage venture fund.
What sets Greycroft apart, Terbeek says, is the fund's flexibility, and its focus on "sexy" B2B and enterprise companies.
<p>Terbeek also discusses his interest in gaming companies such as Scopely, and where he sees the industry going and why it's seeing such explosive growth in the past few years. <em> </em></p><p>"I think there's a couple reasons," Terbeek says. "One is the technology of games has gotten so good and so realistic and so similar to real-world kind of stuff. The second is the interactivity of the games, especially player-to-player, both the ability to play against somebody, but also to communicate and build relationships with people.<i>"</i><br/></p><p><i>Click the playhead to hear the full interview, and subscribe on <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/la-venture-venture-capital-vc/id1471701230" target="_blank">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/la-venture" target="_blank">Stitcher</a>, <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/2syPj1jttbIHjHIEwSrApH" target="_blank">Spotify</a> or wherever you get your podcasts to hear more from L.A. Venture.</i></p>
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Scopely, the Culver City-based mobile games unicorn, announced Tuesday that it has acquired the game development studio PierPlay, also based in Culver City. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
The deal culminates a close partnership that began in 2016 when Scopely turned to PierPlay to help develop a Scrabble game to compete with with Zynga's popular Words with Friends, an off-brand word game that Hasbro has been trying to shut down since it launched in 2009.
<p>Scrabble GO launched in 150 countries last month, becoming the biggest word game launch ever, though it still trails Word with Friends on Apple's app store. </p><p>"Our goal is always to have the best team in the world build a game, where it's internal or external," Tim O'Brien, Scopely's chief revenue officer, told dot.LA. "We knew these guys were a great team. We were always planning on acquiring the studio."</p><p>O'Brien says the deal was underway long before the coronavirus, but a pandemic that has everyone stuck at home and only able to connect with friends virtually is ideal for the addictive Scrabble GO and Scopely's larger portfolio, which has seen revenue increase 10% since before the virus.</p>
<img lazy-loadable="true" src="https://dot.la/media-library/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yMzE3MDQzNS9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYwNjY2MTY4Nn0.Sqf2Ej6f9PiDUJRbtJVw4gZvDK9gUJ5x5mo4QPZRE40/image.jpg?width=980" id="e8909" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="dbc4a2ae43942d95842d320d2503e02e" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" />
<p>"The timing couldn't have been better for us to launch," said O'Brien. "People are downloading more games and playing games longer. For a game like Scrabble GO that's highly social and highly competitive, it's the perfect game right now for people to play."<br></p><p>One concern is that Scopely makes a substantial amount of money from advertising, which is threatened as struggling companies reduce their marketing spend. But O'Brien says rates have already recovered after a brief dip last month.</p><p>Before the pandemic sent workers home, many of PierPlay's 25 employees were already working at Scopely's headquarters on a new game that has yet to be announced. PierPlay co-founder and Chief Executive Lorenzo Nuvoletta will continue to manage the game studio.</p>
<p>"The success we've seen with Scrabble GO has been amazing and we look forward to tackling more exciting projects in the development slate," Nuvoletta said in a statement. Scopely says more than 2.5 million people are playing Scrabble GO daily, with the average session lasting over 100 minutes per day.<br/></p>Scopely is currently valued at $1.9 billion, according to Pitchbook data, and has 800 employees. Last month, <a href="https://dot.la/scopely-raises-additional-200-million-2645525717.html" target="_self">it raised an additional $200 million in Series D funding,</a> doubling the total round to $400M.From Your Site Articles
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