Despite being publicity shy, rumours suggest mobile social gaming powerhouse Storm8 is raising its first funding.

TechCrunch suggests the round could be worth up to $300 million, valuing the company in the $1 billion category.

As we found out when we spoke to CEO Perry Tam at WWDC 2011, he certainly doesn't lack ambition, proclaiming his goal to become 'the number one social gaming mobile company'.

"It's a huge market. The growth in mobile is almost unimaginable," he explained.

In the vanguard

Storm8 is well placed to take maximum advantage of the situation, being the largest mobile-only social publisher.

The company claims over five million daily active users, 210 million downloads on 58 million unique devices, and around 18 billion minutes of gameplay across its Storm8 male-focused titles such as iMobsters and female-focused TeamLava releases Restaurant Story, Fashion Story etc.

It also benefits from its own proprietary social graph, which enables it to cross promote games and link all players into one community. As we've seen from companies such as DeNA, GREE, OpenFeint and ngmoco, these platforms are currently extremely valuable.

In this way, Storm8 suffers much less in terms of reliance on Facebook compared to companies such as Zynga. 

Similarly, Storm8 also announced its first peak $1 million day of revenue in June; which is how the company has organically funded its growth to-date.

TechCrunch says VC such as Accel Partners and Technology Crossover Ventures are involved, citing Zynga was looking to buy it outright, but the price was too high; something it also experienced with PopCap.

[source: TechCrunch]