Zynga Raises $10M From Usual Suspects For Gaming SocNet

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Tribe.net has been an also ran in the social networking space, but its founder Marc Pincus has street cred for being among those who got it early on. Tribe.net was sold to Cisco, moreover, Pincus was an early investor in Facebook.

Pincus has moved on to launch Zynga Game Network, which has just raised $10M. Fred Wilson's Union Square Ventures led the round along with LinkedIn's Reid Hoffman, VC Brad Feld, Bob Pitman, Andy Thiel, and Avalon Ventures.

Zynga has launched a number of games on MySpace and Facebook and as you might expect they found good uptake - Zynga's poker app claims 5.5M users. This is not hugely impressive given that other simple Facebook game apps like Pirates vs. Ninjas also found huge audiences. But Zynga has ramped up quickly with a headcount of 27 so its well positioned to capitalize on this growth.

Zynga got some early love in the press when the New York Times wrote them up.