Wedge Buster secures $2.2M in venture funding, launches social and mobile apps

 Wedge Buster today announced it’s secured $2.2 million in a Series A round of funding, as well as the launch of its social platform.

The funding comes from a variety of investors, including 37 Technology Ventures and Rob Dyrdek (best-known for his pro-skateboarding and various MTV reality shows). The money will be used to accelerate the company’s game development, support marketing and building up Wedge Buster’s distribution network. According to CEO and co-founder Scott Philp, the company is planning to launch one to two new games on both social and mobile platforms per quarter.

The company’s eponymous Wedge Buster Sports is a social sports game platform that recently began appearing on our list of emerging Facebook games. The platform is launching with 100 games to play, many of which are variations of popular web games that have been given a sports theme (Bejewled becomes Ball-Jeweled). Players can challenge their friends to asynchronous matches or enter tournaments with strangers, betting soft currency on the outcome. Philp tells us the company’s focused on sports games because, “no one is doing sports right in social.”

The games monetize in three different ways: Aside from the sale of currency, there are also video ads that play before the start of each game and Philp tells us brand partners are lining up. While he isn’t willing to share what percentage of revenue is currently coming from the brand partnerships, he says it’s a useful stream of income to have while the platform builds up a sizable user base.

Meanwhile, the developer’s first mobile game Battle Darts is nearing completion and should launch for smartphones towards the end of October. Philp tells us Wedge Buster is planning to build up its own brand of sports games under the “Battle” label. Like its social counterparts, Battle Darts allows users to engage in asynchronous matches with their friends and allows them to send drinks to their friends to make the dartboard harder to hit. The game will come in both premium and free (ad-supported) versions, and will also monetize via the purchase of virtual goods like better darts and new dartboards.

“These platforms offer enormous opportunities that aren’t being maximized for sports. We are scaling sports games in a way that’s never been done before,” Philp says. “We know how to be the true leader in sports social gaming: We need a cross channel strategy that includes social, mobile and web.”

According to our AppData traffic-tracking service, Wedge Buster Sports currently has 30,000 monthly active users and 2,000 daily active users, but Philp tells us the average play session is 14 minutes.

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