For the third time this week, Ignition Partners has pumped cash into a San Francisco Bay Area startup. This time, the Bellevue venture capital firm is bankrolling MinoMonsters, which is developing a monster battle and trading game for the iPhone.
Joining the $1 million round are Andreessen Horowitz, SV Angel and Y Combinator. Interestingly, SV Angel — the angel firm of Silicon Valley heavyweight Ron Conway — and Y Combinator — the early-stage tech incubator — are backers of San Francisco mobile software company Parse. Yesterday, Parse announced a $5.5 million round from Ignition.
We’ve noted Ignition’s appetite for deals in the Bay Area in recent months, and that hunger appears to keep growing with the bet on MinoMonsters.
The company says it is building “a secret new world of lovable pet monsters that players battle and trade with friends from their iPhone.”
That sounds a lot like Nanovor, the game that Seattle’s Smith & Tinker launched to much fanfare in 2009 but later shut down in part because it required users to purchase a separate toy called the Nanoscope.
MinoMonsters, led by 19-year-old CEO Josh Buckley, plans to launch on December 6th. TechCrunch notes that Buckley is the youngest CEO ever backed by Andreessen Horowitz.
I am guessing that’s the case for Ignition too.
In addition to MinoMonsters and Parse, Ignition earlier participated in one of its biggest venture rounds to date when it led a $40 million round in Cloudera. The firm, started by former McCaw Cellular and Microsoft execs, has backed more than a dozen companies in the Bay Area this year.
