Google’s corporate venturing unit’s portfolio companies had a busy time last week, with social gaming company Zynga issuing a secondary sale and games company Kabam sealing an acquisition, while the corporate venturing unit inked some early stage deals.
Zynga raised $515m, by selling nearly 43 million shares at $12 per share on Thursday. The filing is here.
Google sold nearly 4m shares, worth $47.5m, as part of the secondary offering. It now holds 19.3 million Zynga shares, which would be worth $231.6m at the price of the secondary offering. Google sold shares worth $17m in Zynga’s $1bn initial public offering in December. Google was reported to have invested more than $100m in the company in 2010. Other corporate venturing backers of Zynga include Japan-based marketing chain management company Transcosmos.
Other venture backers of the company are Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Institutional Venture Partners, Union Square Ventures, Foundry Venture Capital, Avalon Ventures, Silver Lake Partners, Mail.ru Group, Tiger Global Private Investment Partners and DST USA, an affiliate of Russian venture firm Digital Sky Technologies.
Separately on Thursday Kabam bought social games rival Gravity Bear for an undisclosed sum. Kabam’s series D round raised $85m in May last year, with Google, semiconductor maker Intel, wireless communication conglomerate SK Telecom as well as venture firms Performance Equity, Canaan Partners and Redpoint Ventures, among the investors. Online betting company Betfair was an earlier backer. Kabam has raised $125m since it was founded as Watercooler in 2006.
Also on Thursday, Google Ventures backed micro-social networking app Kibits Corp., which launched its product on the iPhone and the iPad. The company raised $1m from Google’s corporate venturing unit and Charles River Ventures, General Catalyst, Commonwealth Capital Ventures, SOSventures, Launch Capital, the CommonAngels Fund and undisclosed angels, according to news provider PE Hub.
Google Ventures also was reported to have invested in Appstack on Tuesday, with backers also said to have included Tomorrow Ventures, 500Startups as well as angels Gary Vaynerchuk, the founder of Winelibrary, Don Dodge ,developer advocate at Google, and Punchbowl founder Matt Douglas, according to news provider TechCrunch.