Benchmark Capital invests in Sulake

Sulake, developers of the Habbo-hotel community (shockwave is still alive!) have yet again secured a round of investements, this time 23.5$ from Benchmark Capital (and co-investors).

It’s been very interesting to follow Aapo’s and Sampo’s (founders, Sulake) venture into the digital hotel business. They started of with a small but neat visual chat application called Mobiles Disco back in -99 (or was it -98?), which I found very interesting. I had been working with both Aapo and Sampo back in the old days and they also tried to hire me as their third employee in 2000, but I decided to head for Razorfish Helsinki instead.

Five years later they have 160 employees in 12 countries and three million unique users visiting their virtual hotels every month. How can one cope with such growth? And with the new round of investement it’s unlikely that things will slow down. I’m quite sure we can expect lots of new virtual hotels in the most remote corners of the world as well as great new multiplayer concepts in the near future from them.