Foundry Group Invests in BigDoor

We recently closed a $4m investment in BigDoor Media. Based in Seattle, BigDoor provides a platform for non-game publishers to integrate game mechanics, such as points, badges, levels, leaderboards, virtual currency and virtual goods, into their web and mobile applications.

The web has become increasingly social. While many simple social features, such as sharing, liking, and favoriting content are appearing on publisher’s sites, users are increasingly engaging with each other in other ways as evidenced by the dramatic success of social games.  As a result, many non-game publishers are now exploring ways to incorporate “game mechanics” into their web and mobile applications.

BigDoor provides the underlying infrastructure that enables publishers to quickly, easily, and inexpensively accomplish this.  Since BigDoor uses an API approach, their system can be configured to be tightly integrated into any publisher’s site.  Due to their cloud-based approach, they can aggressively scale to meet any publisher’s need.

BigDoor is part of a new theme we have been investing in that we call Distribution.  It also overlaps nicely with our Glue theme.  As a cloud based service with a simple API driven pricing model, its deployment and pricing model is similar to SimpleGeo, another recent investment we have made.  Finally, we are very comfortable with its publisher driven adoption model, which is similar to Lijit and modeled after an investment we had previously made in FeedBurner.

Seattle is now home to two Foundry Group investments – BigDoor and Gist. We are also mentors and investors in the Techstars Seattle program, which is led by Andy Sack whom is an investors and board member of BigDoor and introduced the company to us.