The San Francisco-based social games developer Addmired has announced it's relaunching as Machine Zone, raising an additional $8 million in funding.

Series B funds came from Menlo Ventures. This follows the company's $5.3 million Series A investment from Anthos Capital and Baseline Ventures raised in 2011.

One of the gang

Originally launched in 2008 with Y Combinator funds, Addmired doubled in growth every six months, both in terms of player engagement and its team size.

The company now boasts downloads of over 40 million across its popular free-to-play mobile games including Original Gangstaz, Global War, and iMob 2 – one of the top grossing games on the App Store.

"The additional capital means we'll accelerate the growth of our products and platform, expand facilities, and ramp up our recruitment efforts," said Machine Zone CEO Gabriel Leydon.

New faces

Menlo Ventures's managing director and founder of Social Gaming Network, Shervin Pishevar will join the company's board of directors alongside Anthos Capital's Bryan Kelly.

"Gabe and his team have a deep and unique understanding of mobile social games leading to the highest levels of social connections and engagement of any mobile games company I have seen," said Pishevar.

"It's why, after looking far and wide, this is my choice for a mobile social games investment."

Machine Zone currently boasts one billion friendships among its players who clock up several billions of minutes in gameplay every month.

A recently integrated in-game chat system was well received by players logging over 100,000 concurrent users.

[source: PR Newswire]