Plain Vanillia Corp – the San Francisco-based developer behind the QuizUp series – has raised $2.4 million in a Series A funding round led by Greycroft Partners, Tencent, IDG ventures and BOLDStart Ventures.

Other investors include Crunchfund, Mesa Global, Riot Games CEO Brandon J Beck, and Unity CEO David Helgason.

The capital will be used to accelerate the development of QuizUp – which Plain Vanillia refers to as a 'social trivia platform' – and to enable the company's expansion into the Asian market.

Germination

The Series A round follows a $1.2 million seed round that took place in summer 2012, and brings the company's total investment to $3.6 million.

"We are thrilled to be re-investing in Plain Vanilla as the company has exceeded every milestone it set out to achieve in its seed round," explained BOLDstart Ventures managing partner Ed Sim

"Real-time social trivia is a huge market opportunity with no clear winner, and we believe that Plain Vanilla is well positioned to not only be the dominant player but also has the potential to create a new social platform based on interests and mobile gaming."

Word up

"After launching our initial batch of QuizUp games we saw amazing engagement amongst our users and realised that we could use our technology to build a new kind of social experience," explained Plain Vanillia's founder and CEO Thor Fridriksson.

Plain Vanilla boasts that in the last quarter, it has acquired one million registered users to the QuizUp platform, which spans several apps - from sports to maths and game trivia knowledge - across both Android and iOS.

[source: Social Games Observer]