French social game developer Kobojo has announced the completion of the first round of its fund-raising campaign, which raised a total of €5.3 million ($7.5 million) from Endeavour Vision, as lead investor, and IDinvest Partners. For the last 3 years, Kobojo has been editing and publishing a wide variety of social games and apps such as Goobox and PyramidVille. Kobojo, with its current workforce of 30 employees, intends to use these funds to step up its development in France as well as internationally. New international offices will be set up, the first new office will be opened in Madrid, Spain. To lift the user base (from currently 3.2 million Monthly Active Users according to Appdata) Kobojo will probably use a significant share for large scale non-organic user aquisition.

ggKobojo already has a number of successful games under its belt. The company was founded in 2008 when Franck Tetzlaff and Vincent Vergonjeanne, CEO and VP for Products and Strategy respectively, former finalists and winners of the Imagine Cup and graduates of the French computer engineering school EPITA, decided to create gaming applications on Facebook. Their first game “Petite Questions entre Amis” (“A few questions among friends”) was successful, gaining 8 million MAU in just two months. The team launched “Goobox” in July 2009, which gained 3 million monthly active users in one month. PyramidVille, Kobojo’s latest release, gained 1.6 million installations in less than 6 weeks in France (climax at ca. 1.3 million MAU).

“Raising the funds is in line with Kobojo’s strategic goals to become international and create new user experiences. We want to localise versions of our games in markets with increasing demand for social gaming, in particular Spain and in Italy. These funds will also help us focus on R&D to enable us to provide these games on various platforms such as Smartphones and touch tablets, as well as Facebook in the very  near future.” says Vincent Vergonjeanne, VP for Products and Strategy at Kobojo. “Our ambition at Kobojo is to become the leading gaming software editor in Europe. We believe that these funds, combined with our unequalled technical expertise and our ever-growing group of fans, are the perfect ingredients to achieve this,” he adds. Vincent did not want to communicate more precise details on company goals at this point but stressed that he sees Kobojo’s “hyper-localization” as one of the biggest future success factors. “Hyper-localization” is already practised by Kobojo and means total localization in a country, not only in terms of language but also in terms of culture. An example for the lack of “hyper-localisation” are promotional items for Thanksgiving or Halloween, to which most Europeans cannot relate.

With the new round of funding Kobojo joins the race with Wooga (24.3 million MAU), Social Point (17.5 million MAU) and Megazebra (4.1 million MAU) to become the biggest social game developer in Europe. Just recently Megazebra has announced a round of funding as well while Europe’s currently biggest social game developer Wooga took over the fourth position globally.