The multinational online social strategy game eRepublik said it has exceeded one million registered users in 2009, with 329,000 regular users. Alexis Bonte, co-founder and CEO of eRepublik unveils the plans of the company for 2010 in an interview to Wall-Street.
“2009 has been a year of hard work for eRepublik, we received a €2 million in funding from AGF Private Equity, our team increased from 14 to 45. We started the year with less than 50,000 active players, and now we have 1 million registered users with more than 320,000 of them playing the game on a regular basis”, said Alexis Bonte (photo).
In June, eRepublik has been the recipient of a funding round from AGF private Equity, the fund holding a minority stake in the project. This was the third financing round, after the €200,000 tranche in 2007 and €550,000 in 2008. But how difficult was to attract financing?
“Every funding round is difficult to close, especially if you get a company off the ground in Romania and under the worst economic conditions since the Great Depression. I think that the simple fact that we managed to achieve these objectives confirms the great potential of eRepublik concept and of the team that we built over the years”, Bonte added.
In case there won’t be any other urgent needs from those already included in the development plan, Alexis Bonte says eRepublik Labs has sufficient resources to meet its 2010 goals.
“We will continue developing eRepublik game, we hope to get as close as possible to the completion of the project. We plan to finalize two thirds or even more of the project. Now, there is only one third completed,” he pointed out.
On the other hand, eRepublik doesn’t sell ad space to outside companies, the registered users being the sole advertisers that can promote their own ideas, campaigns, publications or even political parties.
For the
