As you might expect, given that the company's just raised $11 million, NaturalMotion CEO Torsten Reil is in bullish mood.

But it's not just about the money, which brings the UK company's total investment to $19 million, he explains.

"Money is part of it, but we're generating revenue," he says.

"This is specifically about getting Benchmark Capital and Mitch."

That's Mitch Lasky to you and me.

The right stuff

Benchmark's general partner is one of venture capital's hottest properties, most recently feted for his involvement in Riot Games.

It raised around $10 million to launch its massively successful online free-to-play game League of Legends; selling for a rumoured $400 million to Chinese online company Tencent two years later.

Before his time as a VC, Lasky was founder and CEO of Nasdaq-floated game publisher JAMDAT Mobile, which was bought by EA, and he's worked at Activision and Disney.

He's also as bullish as Reil about the potential for high end free-to-play games, giving a talk at GDC 2012 predicting there's an opportunity for a new billion dollar company in the space.

Looking west

And that's where the new cash will be put to work.

NaturalMotion is already profitable thanks to titles such as My Horse and its animation tools business, but Reil argues now is the time to go all into the free-to-play market.

"We need to scale as fast and as smartly as possible and that's not a straightforward process," he says.

NaturalMotion has its main game development teams in the UK, in Oxford and London, but is aggressively staffing up its new San Francisco office.

Despite the local competition - companies such as GREE, Zynga, ngmoco etc - Reil says the office is worth the investment.

"There's so much talent there and we attract slightly different people," he says.

New way to play

What he means is that unlike those companies, NaturalMotion's focus is pushing the technical boundaries on mobile devices, especially in terms of 3D graphics.

Combining this with the mobile sector's massive and frictionless distribution gives the company what it hopes will be its critical advantage.

"We're combining console quality experiences with mobile usage patterns," Reil points out.

"People might be playing in short bursts, but the quality of our games means that overall they're playing for long periods of time."

And the longer they play, the more they'll eventually pay in terms of buying in-app purchases.

Hence, the obvious outcome of the investment is that NaturalMotion will be accelerating its release schedule. Not that it doesn't have plenty currently in development, with CSR Racing, the title revealed in Apple's WWDC 2012 keynote, already raising expectations.