RockYou Raises $35M

RockYou has joined Clearspring and Slide as widget companies raising huge rounds of funding.  It's interesting to me that each of these companies continue to up the ante, as opposed to taking exits.  The biggest widget companies appear to be thinking very, very big indeed.

Here's a quote from the press release:

(San Mateo, CA- June 9, 2008,) RockYou, a pioneer in widget development and the leading developer and distributor of social applications on the social web, announced today it has closed a Series C funding round of $35 million led by DCM. Several private investors also participated in the round.

The funding will enable the company to grow its team, increase its advertising and publisher offerings, and expand its portfolio of social applications. Today, RockYou can be found on major social networks, including MySpace, hi5, Facebook, Bebo, Friendster and more. RockYou’s network reaches 87.5M monthly uniques with 2.7 billion page views. The company has embraced the OpenSocial standard and has taken the lead with over 10 million installs across hi5, MySpace and Orkut.