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Barely one month after announcing it was creating a locally focused rewards program for businesses using its location-based gaming engine, Scvngr Inc. of Cambridge has launched it in the Greater Boston area with its 50 first customers.
When announced on July 28, Scvngr founder and “chief ninja” Seth Preibatsch said the company hoped to have the first 50 businesses — which were offered the service free of charge by being among the first 50 — signed up within a couple of weeks.
“The first 50 filled up within a couple of days,” Priebatsch said yesterday.
Among the challenges and businesses in the local launch are the call to take a photo of the artist or band performing at the Middle East in Cambridge and win a 20 percent discount on your meal, or pick what you think is the most under-rated drink on the menu at Boston pub Lir then and win a free non-alcoholic drink of your choice.
All of the challenges are completed either via text message or through a mobile app for iPhone or Android-based phones.
According to Priebatsch, Boston is just the first in a rapid expansion of local business blocks of Scvngr games.
“We are definitely doing this in San Francisco, Philadelphia, New York, L.A., Chicago — in many of those cities, all 50 are already signed up,” Priebatsch said.
To achieve that level of growth, Priebatsch decided to forego the profits the barely two-year old company had started to make in the beginning of the year and eat into some of the funding it had already taken, which included a $4 million investment last December led by Google Ventures, the investing arm of Google Inc., and an $825,000 seed round led by Highland Capital Partners last June.
The startup added staff at a furious pace and is now at about 60 employees, according to Priebatsch. “There was one period where we hired a person a day for a month,” he said. Those 60 employees service a client list that now numbers about 1,000.
Growth at Scvngr has been so rapid that the company was bursting at the seams at its previous location in Boston’s South End, and it found the right spot in the former R&D space for European telecom Orange, which not coincendentally happened to be where Scvngr board member and Google Ventures partner Rich Miner used to work before going to Google to run its mobile development efforts.
Scvngr moved into the new Cambridge space at the beginning of June, and Priebatsch describes it as “insanely cool.”
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