In all poker games, if more than one player remains after the last betting round, remaining players expose and compare their hands to determine the winner or winners. This is called the showdown.
Oberon Media, a leading casual gaming solution provider, held the cards tight this year after buying UK based I-Play, a mobile gaming company. Oberon continued to do so when it announced an additional undisclosed round of investments, and even more so when it didn’t disclose the deal terms of their acquisition of PixelPlay, a global provider of brand-name games and entertainment for cross-platform play on interactive television, broadband, iPTV and mobile devices two months later.
In Oberon’s recent FCC filings, they had to showdown. The filings revealed the price of the acquisitions, approximately totaling $70 million, which includes an $18 million common stock exchange, and $52.52 million in newly-raised junior preferred stock. The additional investment round was $47.4 million. Not bad.
Oberon’s investors inlude Goldman Sachs Asset Management, Oak Investment Partners, Lehman Brothers Venture Capital, Morgan Stanley Private Equity, former e-Bay chairman Jeff Skoll through Capricorn Management, and Zohar Gilon. Even more impressive.
Oberon’s main product, the Game Center platform is the industry standard and has been adopted by some of the world’s largest corporations, powering sites such as: MSN Game Network, Verizon Broadband, Comcast, HP, Playboy, MTV and more. The platform enables partners to integrate online games, branding and features to fulfill each partner’s specific needs.
Oberon Media is a private company founded in 2003 by CEO Tomer Ben Kiki, chairman Tal Kerret and head of Biz Dev, Ofer Leidner. The company has 300 employees, of whom 70 are at its development center in Tel Aviv and the rest in offices in New York, Seattle, London, Cyprus and Singapore. Oberon’s top-selling casual games, which can be played in more than a dozen languages can be purchased and downloaded from the internet, cellular telephones, and home entertainment systems.
Download the filings:
Oberon’s junior preferred filing: Oberon_Preferred.pdf
Oberon’s common filing: Oberon_Common.pdf
[links via PE Hub]
I'm a former general partner at google ventures, head of Google for Entrepreneurs in Europe and founding head of Campus London, Google's first physical hub for startups.
I'm also the founder of Techbikers, a non-profit bringing together the startup ecosystem on cycling challenges in support of Room to Read. Since inception in 2012 we've built 11 schools and 50 libraries in the developing world.
