Mobile quiz startup Qrank will announce next week that it has raised a seed round of funding, including an investment from early Twitter VP of Product Jason Goldman. Qrank is building out a platform that will let any organization with a backlog of content use it to create smart, fast-paced mobile trivia games. The games incorporate social networks, location, chat and other social features. It sounds awesome.
Goldman is one of five investors in a convertible note of $350,000, ReadWriteWeb has learned and the company has confirmed. The company will use the funding to build a self-service platform, acquire more high-profile customers and complete an analytics dashboard. The existing consumer app gets high marks for responsiveness and user engagement. Can Qrank extend that formula out across the mobile web?
I’m not a big game player, but I like Qrank. It’s a game that treats me like an intelligent adult, but also incorporates a fast pace and immediate on-boarding into the experience. The default game’s questions are thought provoking, the design is nice, the experience is fast paced and social. It’s good.
I’d love to see how the platform could turn a body of content from ReadWriteWeb, or from a set of known websites about a common topic, into a social quiz game.
Launched 18 months ago by Austin, Texas based Ricochet Labs, the startup has been working with Goldman as an advisor since June. Also advising the company is Ross Fubini of Kapor Capital. CEO Rodney Gibbs previously built and sold a game development company called Fizz Factor.
Goldman is widely understood to have been essential to the creation of Twitter’s early product. He left the company last December and joined Twitter co-founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone at Obvious Corp, now an investment group for social good minded startups. Obvious’s first investment was a stealth startup called Lift, which we published the first details about in August.
Goldman invested in Qrank independent of Obvious. Joining him are Sam Shank,
Trip Levis, Wild Basin Investments and Chris Sherman.
Then Redmonk analyst Michael Coté called Qrank one of Austin’s most interesting startups last year, especially from a business model perspective.
