That was fast! Earlier today Electronic Arts announced the acquisition of J2Play in their latest quarterly report. Congratulations to Rob and the entire J2Play team!
Waterloo based J2Play was founded by Rob Balahura in 2006 to create the world’s first mobile multiplayer game and SDK. The product that ultimately emerged was a “social wrapper” for online games, the first incarnation, a Facebook App that enabled games to be embedded within the social network and extended with chat and leaderboards.
While the J2Play powered games themselves garnered limited user interest, Facebook having reined in on Apps in a catastrophic way for most, the team was hard at work establishing relationships with industry leaders who wanted in on some social network pixie dust.
J2Play was funded by Toronto’s Extreme Venture Partners. Running with the new fund was a smart move on Balahura’s part, they were instrumental in getting the company in front of fbFund and helping secure an additional $250,000 in follow on grant funding. Worth note, ExtremeVP has also since been able to secure follow on funding for Kontagent.
The terms of the acquisition were not released, but ExtremeVP’s LPs have to be pleased. This early exit bodes very well and has demonstrated some savvy investing by partners, Amar Varma and Sundeep Madra.
August 5th, 2009 at 5:59 am
Great news. I absolutely love seeing Canadian companies (especially ones backed by Canadian investors) get an exit. Congrats to everyone involved!
August 5th, 2009 at 7:59 am
Great news. I absolutely love seeing Canadian companies (especially ones backed by Canadian investors) get an exit. Congrats to everyone involved!
August 5th, 2009 at 3:46 pm
[...] Yesterday I spoke with Amar Varma from Extreme Venture Partners. They have create a Bootup Labs/Techstars like startup program in Toronto called Extreme University! From all of us at Bootup Labs, we welcome them to the scene. Well, the reality is that they’re not that new. They’ve been working on a number of projects under the Extreme brand, including a venture fund, and a elite web services company called Xtreme Labs. AND, they’ve already had one exit: J2Play was recently acquired by EA. [...]
August 9th, 2009 at 3:30 pm
Congrats to the J2Play team and ExtremeVP!
August 9th, 2009 at 4:22 pm
Big ups Rob and EVP!
August 9th, 2009 at 10:30 pm
Congrats to the J2Play team and ExtremeVP!
August 9th, 2009 at 5:30 pm
Congrats to the J2Play team and ExtremeVP!
August 9th, 2009 at 11:22 pm
Big ups Rob and EVP!
August 9th, 2009 at 6:22 pm
Big ups Rob and EVP!
May 21st, 2010 at 1:55 pm
[...] firm in Canada. They have a track record of selling companies to big players (Bumptop to Google, J2Play to EA). The Extreme Ventures, XtremeLabs, and Extreme University programs are building into a fantastic [...]
July 2nd, 2010 at 12:45 pm
[...] heard EA was in town but had no idea where, they actually bought out a local gaming startup called J2Play, so that explains that! Andy went over a bit of the history of what J2Play did in the social [...]