Ze Frank Receives $500,000 For Social Gaming

Video blogger and game designer Ze Frank announced that his stealth social gaming startup, Ze Frank Games, has raised $500,000 in a seed round from a group of angel investors. The new studio's backers include Andreessen Horowitz, Founder Collective, SV Angel, betaworks, Lerer Ventures, First Round Capital, CrossCut Ventures, Joshua Schachter, and Gary Vaynerchuck. Ze Frank is best known for his video podcasts like "The Show" (now ended) and his clips at Time. He's created and released several games, such as Memory (available on the App Store as Memari) and Color Wars for Twitter. Though Ze Frank remains secretive about what exactly his studio is working on, he has put up job listings for an interaction designer and graphic artist, and hinted that his projects will have something to do with social gaming and take advantage of the lessons he's learned from his previous work. "The company is still in stealth mode – but it will involve social gaming and will be influenced heavily by what I’ve learned about play and participation over the last ten years with projects like The Show and Color Wars," said Ze Frank, according to a report from TechCrunch.