Robin Wauters currently works as a staff writer for TechCrunch and lead editor of Virtualization.com. Aside from his professional blogging activities, he’s an entrepreneur, event organizer, occasional board adviser and angel investor but most importantly an all-round startup champion. Wauters lives and works in Belgium, a tiny country in Europe. He can often be found working from his home or... ? Learn More
Exclusive - Xfire, which operates a social service used by 19 million gamers, has raised $4 million in fresh funding from Intel Capital and unnamed angel investors.
As a result of the capital injection, Xfire is severing the ties with Titan Gaming, the company that acquired them from Viacom a little over a year ago.
Both Xfire and Titan will henceforth operate independently from one another.
In addition to the spin-off and funding news, Xfire has also announced a trio of new execs joining its leadership team; Titan Gaming co-founder Mark Donovan will serve as President, Juston Brommel as CMO and Autumn Radtke as Director of Business Development.
Xfire provides a social communication platform targeted specifically at gamers, with features like group text and voice chats and user-generated content sharing tools such as screenshots, videos and live game broadcasts.
Newly appointed Xfire President Mark Donovan pitches the service as a sort of “Facebook meets Skype for gamers”. Very meta!
Either way, the company says it supports a lively ecosystem that currently comprises ‘hundreds of game publisher partners’ and more than 19 million end users.
Intel Capital joins the following early-stage investors in backing Xfire: Tomorrow Ventures, Clearstone Venture Partners principals William Quigley and Jim Armstrong, PriceGrabber co-founder Kamran Pourzanjani, and MP3.com founder Michael Robertson.
Donovan tells me Xfire originally received up to a Series C financing round since its founding, followed by an investment of ‘several millions of dollars’ by Viacom during the latter’s ownership of the company. He estimates that roughly $44 million has been injected into the company to date.
Xfire is a messaging and chat client for gamers that offers a number of features that fit seamlessly into the PC gaming experience. Xfire users can locate their friends and see who is online currently and what games are being played, XFire users can then join their friend’s game with one click from the Xfire client and chat inside the game window while playing with their friends. Xfire also provides gamers with server tracking tools, a P2P...
Learn more Intel Capital, Intel’s global investment organization, makes equity investments in innovative technology start-ups and companies worldwide. Intel Capital invests in a broad range of companies offering hardware, software, and services targeting enterprise, home, mobility, health, consumer Internet, semiconductor manufacturing and cleantech. Since 1991, Intel Capital has invested more than US$9.7 billion in over 1,100 companies in 48 countries. In that timeframe, 189 portfolio companies have gone public on various exchanges around the world and 258 were acquired or participated...
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