Xfire To Fly Solo Again, Raises $4 Million From Intel Capital

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...

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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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Nvidia: We’re No Longer In The Processor Business Because Intel “Preferred That We Weren’t”

Devin Coldewey is a Seattle-based writer and photographer. He has written for the TechCrunch network since 2007. Some posts he’d like you to read: The Dangers of Externalizing Knowledge | Generation i | Surveillant Society | Choose Two | Frame Wars | The User’s Manifesto | Our Great Sin His personal website is coldewey.cc. ? Learn More

If the meek capitulation in the headline sounds uncharacteristic of Nvidia’s infamously outspoken CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang, it’s probably because he’s bitter. Though the GPU-focused company announced way back in 2008 that it was going to “open a can of whoop-ass” on Intel, very little has happened, at least on the consumer side. Intel and Nvidia have had some major differences, and remain fierce competitors, but it’s been made clear that Intel won’t tolerate anyone making a grab at its x86 treasure hoard.

But Nvidia isn’t going quietly. Or rather, they’re going quietly just so they can sneak around the back. While Intel is cracking its whip at anyone who wants a piece of x86, Nvidia and ARM, among others, are performing a flanking maneuver in the mobile sector.

Intel itself has expressed contrition regarding its mobile and tablet efforts. When you’re shipping a couple hundred million processors every year, things like the iPad get lost in the shuffle, apparently. But the power level of tablets and mobiles is growing, and Intel has not provided that growth. They promised an x86 handset in 2012, but at this point they’re playing catch-up. Only an tiny fraction of tablets and phones sold use Intel hardware — mainly the Windows-running ones. Meanwhile Nvidia is getting lean and focusing on blowing up their graphics and mobile divisions.

The next couple years might see some interesting partnerships, however. The ARM-Nvidia alliance might go up against something like an Intel-Microsoft-Nokia conglomerate, while team Apple watches from the sidelines. It’ll be a hell of a battle, but the winner will really be the consumer, whom every company will be going out of their way to please. Faster, smaller, and cheaper chips and phones. Sounds like a good deal to me.

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