QuizUp studio receives $22M in venture capital funding

Plain Vanilla Games, the studio behind popular mobile trivia app QuizUp, received $22 million in series B venture capital funding round today, the company has announced.

According to Plain Vanilla, QuizUp has exceeded five million downloads since it launched for iOS last month. The company reports that the app boasts more than five million active users, 22,000 of which have registered to help create trivia content and questions for the app.

The $22 million round, led by Sequoia Capital and including investments from other major companies like Tencent Holdings, comes after a successful $1.2 million seed round, $2.5 million series A round and $2 million extension round earlier this fall.

In QuizUp, plays answer trivia questions spanning a variety of topics. Users can purchase experience points, which can be used to customize their profiles or be traded for trophies. To further monetization efforts, Plain Vanilla is planning to allow companies to sponsor certain topics following success with sponsorship for categories on films like Twilight and Batman. This round of funding will go towards expanding Plain Vanilla's QuizUp content onto other mobile platforms and localization efforts, according to Roelof Botha, partner at Sequoia Capital.

"The first is to expand to additional platforms like Android and iPad," Botha said. "The second is to expand into additional languages beyond English. And lastly the aim is to create more localized categories, so that people from say, South Africa, where I am from, can begin to create trivia about local sports like rugby and cricket that don't yet exist."

"There is always a danger with games that people play them for a week or so, then get bored, discard them and move on to the shiny new thing," Plain Vanilla CEO Thor Fridriksson said in a press statement. "The difference with QuizUp is that our users are becoming part of communities, chatting with one another, forming relationships, and investing deeply in the experience."