Friday, January 6, 2012

Brass Monkey swings biz model around, closes $750K seed round

By Rodney Brown

Having shifted its business model, gameplay software developer Brass Monkey Inc. has closed on a $750,000 seed funding round, according to CEO Chris Allen.

A total of about 13 angels invested in the Boston company's first institutional round, Allen said, which would be used to help push forward Brass Monkey's new business plan with further product development and some more staff for the eight-person company.

Among the local angels imvolved in the round are Nicole Stata, founder of Boston Seed Capital LLC; Michael Dornbrook, former COO of Harmonix Music Systems Inc. and now a member of Boston CommonAngels; video blogging pioneer Steve Garfield and Adam Miller, CEO of Abroad1010, a fellow MassChallenge finalist with Brass Monkey in 2010.

"Pedro Torres Picón of Quotidian Ventures out of New York City is our biggest investor," Allen said. "Bob Brinker, who came in to close out the round, is based out of Colorado and this is his first investment." Brinker is the the editor and publisher of the Brinker Fixed Income Advi$or.

Founded originally as a developer of a platform that allowed game designers to use any smartphone with an acceleromoter and Bluetooth as a game controller, recently Brass Monkey has shifted to providing a web portal through which users can play games on their smartphone – still using it as the controller – after downloading a free app. Right now the company makes money by offering interstitial ads on the free app as the game loads, but eventually it will add a points-based system for getting access to the games, by getting Brass Monkey "coins," Allen said. The coins can be earned through game play like Microsoft points for Xbox Live users, or purchased with real money.

That new portal is what Brass Monkey will be showing off at next week's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Allen said. The iPhone version of the app needed to get a phone to act as the controller is pending approval right now, he said, and an Android version will be ready by March at the latest. 

Brass Monkey won't have a booth of its own at CES, but will be paired with a couple of impressive partners.

"Verizon and Alcatel-Lucent – we will be in both of their booths," Allen said. AT CES, Verizon will have Brass Monkey at booth 30259, and Alcatel-Lucent at booth 31412.

Also on the horizon is a trip to bars for Brass Monkey, he said.

"We are also looking into putting this experience into bars, because we can tap into the TVs that are already there," Allen said, "and we can allow people to play games with our game console and their smartphones."

In June, Brass Monkey acquired Emotely, a San Francisco-based software developer, which brought HTML5 to the Brass Monkey platform. That helped it build the browser-agnostic game console.

"The beauty of our platform is that it is web based and can run on any browser," Allen said.