Big Blue Parrot
An up and coming mobile gaming venture, focused on creating rich turn-based experiences.
| Date | Investors | Amount | Round |
|---|---|---|---|
| - | investor | €0.0 | round |
| investor investor investor | €0.0 | round | |
* | $10.0m Valuation: $15.0m | Acquisition | |
| Total Funding | 000k | ||
Big Blue Parrot, founded in Tel Aviv, Israel, in 2009, was a mobile gaming company focused on developing social games for mobile devices. The firm was established by Gilad Almog, Gal Weizenberg, and Daniel Rechter. The founding team brought together significant technical experience; Almog and Weizenberg served in Israel's Intelligence Corps, with Weizenberg later working at Microsoft Israel, and Rechter had prior startup experience with a venture named vTour.
The company's core offering was a patent-pending platform designed to facilitate asynchronous gameplay, allowing friends to participate in the same game without needing to be online simultaneously. This addressed a common challenge in social gaming, where coordinating playtimes among friends can be difficult. Their flagship product built on this platform was Poker Friends, a free-to-play casino game for iOS that gained considerable popularity. The business model centered on social gaming with integrated monetization techniques, customer relationship management (CRM), and personalization tools.
Operationally, Big Blue Parrot was a lean startup, with a team of around 8 employees. The company successfully raised $2.5 million in a funding round that included investors like iAngels, Gigi Levy, Rami Lipman, and Haim Blecher. This investment positioned the company for its eventual acquisition. In September 2015, the gaming company Playtika acquired Big Blue Parrot for an estimated $10 million. The deal was characterized as an "acqui-hire," suggesting that Playtika's primary motivation was to onboard Big Blue Parrot's skilled team.
Keywords: mobile gaming, asynchronous gameplay, social games, acqui-hire, Poker Friends, patent-pending, game development, Playtika, turn-based games, social gaming platform