I picked this up off a forwarded email from a contact of mine – we both have been watching Singapore-based Garena for a while from a personal angle with much interest. The founding team are friends of mine, so I was very happy to learn that the Garena management team had raised $2M from Toivo Annus himself, albeit earlier in July 2008 this year. Yes I know my news is old and slow, but I still think it’s worth mentioning and celebrating over.
“The gaming industry has been bullish in recent times. With Garena providing free, high-quality software which connects gamers worldwide reliably, I am confident that Garena will continue to show healthy growth globally,” Annus said in a statement.
I firmly believe we will see more pronounced indications of cocooning as we wade through these depressing times – bad news for most tech startups, but good news for fun-enabling infrastructure and gaming technology such as Garena.
If you’re an investor, Garena is currently raising a new round for expansion – not that they really need the money though. Let me know if you’d like to be put in touch with the team.
If you’re an online gamer, do check them out – an online gaming client similar in essence to Xfire, except that its architecture is peer-to-peer, which allows for crazy scalability. Imagine, significantly reduced lag when you’re fragging in a 100-player arena!
Go figure.
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{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
congrats to garena for landing a great investor.
although i think the space is a little crowded but i think there is room to grow.
would love to know more about the next round of financing requirements.
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Garena? no kidding man, these guys can’t hack it.
they are just hosting PvPGN…dun see them contributing back to the open-source community in any way.
Their website is running off Joomla and really cringe-worthy. Makes one wonder why their coding skills are so bad.
These guys are just a bunch of sysadmins, not hackers. Toivo Annus is investing in Garena because of their huge user base.
I wonder why the Singapore government is co-investing in the deal. These guys have no IP, the business model is somewhat suspect.
Take a look @ PvPGN’s predecessor Bnetd which was shut down by Blizzard Gaming (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bnetd).
Undoubtfully great story u got here. It’d be just great to read something more concerning such matter. Thnx for giving this data.
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