London’s Tech City, the heart of the UK’s equivalent to Silicon Valley, Silicon Roundabout, has been crying out for a real start up success story for a while – and now it has it.
Social casino games start up Plumbee has just announced some remarkable figures, showing eight digit annualised revenue numbers just six months after the launch of its first game. It’s also increased in size from its three original founders to a staff of 35 since July 2011. By anyone’s standards, that’s remarkable growth in such a short space of time.
Plumbee was founded by three former Playfish staffers, Raf Keustermans, Gerald Tan and Jodi Moran, with a focus on the best online experience for gamers. It’s a focus that looks to have paid off. The company’s most successful game across all platforms, Mirrorball Slots, is played by over three million people in Europe, the US and Australia and launched on Facebook in March 2012.
Perhaps surprisingly for a casino game, Plumbee’s user base is, in the main, women (67% versus 33% male), of which the average age is 52, while the male gamers are much younger with an average age of 30.
Plumbee have also been choosing their staff carefully too, hiring from the likes of EA Playfish, Nokia, Betfair, Namco-Bandai, Bodog, NextGen and TinyCo into engineering, marketing, analytics and in-house casino experience roles. According to CTO and co-founder Jodi Moran, being in Tech City has helped tremendously in this area.
Plumbee’s CEO and co-founder Raf Keustermans said:
As a UK-based tech blog, it’s really good to see this sort of success coming out of Silicon Roundabout and we’re looking for even bigger things from Plumbee in the next few years.