Jambool

Jambool, Inc. was a financial technology company established in 2006 by Amazon.com veterans Vikas Gupta and Reza Hussein. Drawing from their extensive backgrounds in payment infrastructures at Amazon, where Gupta led the development of the Amazon Flexible Payments Service and Hussein worked on building Amazon Mechanical Turk, the founders initially launched Jambool as a collaborative online research tool. Recognizing a burgeoning opportunity in the social gaming landscape, the company pivoted in 2008 to launch its flagship product, Social Gold.

Social Gold emerged as a comprehensive virtual currency and payments platform tailored for developers of social games and applications. The platform's business model centered on providing a white-label solution that enabled developers to create, manage, and optimize their own in-app virtual economies. This was achieved through easy-to-integrate APIs that allowed even small developers to implement a virtual currency system quickly. For end-users, Social Gold facilitated a streamlined, in-app payment experience, removing the friction of exiting a game to make a purchase and thereby increasing monetization for developers. The service offered robust analytics, providing developers with insights to fine-tune their virtual marketplaces. Revenue was generated by taking a share of the microtransactions processed through the platform.

The company's trajectory was marked by significant investor confidence, securing a total of $6 million in funding over two rounds from investors including Madrona Venture Group, Bay Partners, and CRV. This financial backing fueled its growth, and by 2010, Social Gold had become a widely used direct payments platform for social games on Facebook. This success culminated in August 2010, when Google acquired Jambool for an estimated $70 million. The acquisition was part of Google's broader strategy to bolster its position in the social networking and gaming sectors. Following the acquisition, Gupta became Google's Head of Consumer Payments, and Hussein joined Google's engineering team, integrating Jambool's expertise into Google's existing payment and social frameworks.

Keywords: Jambool, Social Gold, Vikas Gupta, Reza Hussein, virtual currency, payments platform, social games, microtransactions, in-app payments, monetization platform, white-label, virtual economy, developer tools, fintech, Google acquisition, Madrona Venture Group, Bay Partners, Amazon veterans, payment processing, social applications