Carlsbad, CA-based Razer bills itself as a maker of “professional gaming” hardware, which always struck me as an oxymoron, like “jumbo shrimp.”
Nevertheless, Razer just demonstrated how serious it is, raising $50 million in a Series A round venture round led by the IDG-Accel China Capital Fund, a global investment fund established by IDG and Accel Partners.
Razer was founded in 1998 by Min-Liang Tan and Robert Krakoff, and says its capital previously came from angel investors and the company’s own global operations. Over the past 13 years or so, Razer says its operations have grown to hundreds of employees in nine cities, including San Francisco, Hamburg, Seoul, Shanghai and Singapore.
“We took a long time raising our first VC round as games like Battlefield 3 kept us pretty busy recently,” CEO Tan says in a statement from the company. “More importantly, we took our time selecting an institutional investor as we wanted to find a partner that understood our commitment to gaming and our no-compromise attitude to designing products. Plus these guys didn’t freak out when we disappeared for a week in the middle of the deal when Skyrim launched.”
Author: Bruce V. Bigelow
In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here.
Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.
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