RockYou is one of the leading companies that creates and distributes widgets on the web and on social networks today announced an additional $17M in investments from Softbank, leading shareholder of Yahoo! Japan, and SK Telecom Ventures, the venture capital arm of SK Telecom. In June of 2008 RockYou announced an initial C Round investment of $35M, led by DCM; this strategic round brings the company’s funding to a total of $67M.

The combined strategic financing will enable RockYou to extend their presence in the Asia-Pacific market. RockYou has been focusing development efforts overseas, including expansion into China’s largest social network, Xiaonei. Cuttently RockYou’s reach is ~100M monthly uniques with over 8 billion page views. Their growth as been nothing short of phenominal.

SoftBank and RockYou will also set up a new joint venture company that will develop widget and application products and services for use on PCs and mobile devices in the Asian market, in particular the Japanese, Korean, Russian, and Chinese markets. Each of the JV Partners will contribute technology, know-how, systems and human resources to the Joint Venture.

Lance Tokuda, RockYou CEO and Founder said: “We are thrilled to welcome Softbank and SK Telecom Ventures as strategic investors. They will play a leading role as we extend the RockYou brand throughout Asia. We are also happy to announce the formation of a joint venture between RockYou and Softbank. The JV will create and distribute mobile and social web applications in Asia.”

Patrick Chung, Managing Director, SK Telecom Ventures added: “”RockYou has shown unprecedented growth for an early stage company. We look forward to working closely with RockYou to help them further expand their domestic and Asian operations, particularly in Korea.”

The new financing will be used to increase RockYou’s domestic growth, including the opening of New York, Los Angeles & Detroit offices. The company will also explore the acquisition of applications that can leverage RockYou’s existing network in line with the company’s product roadmap.

RockYou has stated that they will continue to grow the internal ad sales force, develop innovative channels for brands and vertical markets to utilize the RockYou Ads network, including Automotive, Retail and Entertainment specific application verticals. Launched earlier this year, the RockYou Ads network has given brands such as eBay Autos, Gap and Toyota the ability to launch customized applications and interactive campaigns to capture the attention of social network users. RockYou’s applications are available on all of the major social networks, including Bebo, Facebook, Friendster, hi5 and MySpace.

We have included these 2 video interviews from about 18 months ago that I did with RockYou CEO Lance Tokuda outside of facebook during the first f8 platform developers meeting.

Part 1

Part 2

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