In a new round of capital funding, Wazap has received an additional $7.9 million as part of its effort to expand its presence into the United States. Currently, the gaming search engine is only available in the Chinese, Japanese, and German languages, respectively.
Wazap is scheduled to launch in the United States in February.
Partech International heads up the second round of funding, with additional support from Wellington Partners. Wellington contributed $4 million in capital to Wazap in the company’s initial monetary campaign.
Vertical and niche searches are becoming all the rage, and with the video game industry ripe for takeoff in 2007, the timing for a U.S. launch of the gaming search engine couldn’t be better.
An ECP article comments on the conceptual approach that Wazap has taken:
It’s another of those ideas that seems so obvious in hindsight, you’re left wondering why it hasn’t been done before. It boasts 11 million unique users a month, with 200 million page views. It logged $1 million in revenue last year, it says.
Wazap’s success in the U.S. will probably come as more of a challenge, given the established presence of widely popular online gaming portals such as IGN, as well as others.
Of course, Wazap’s strategy may not be that of direct competition with IGN. In fact, searching for game titles within the engine may lead directly to articles hosted by the IGN portal. The nuance here is that Wazap is an aggregation resource, not a content provider in and of itself.
So instead of going to IGN to get a review of a game, then navigating over to GameFAQs to get a look at the walkthrough and cheats, users will instead be able to search for a particular game and get the entire lowdown within a SERP page, cutting down the research time.
Well, this is the concept that Wazap is banking on, anyway. It’ll be interested to see what kind of success and/or fanfare the U.S. launch is met with next month.
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Joe is a staff writer for Murdok. Visit Murdok for the latest ebusiness news.
