Almost everybody sometimes secretly fantasizes of leading completely different life. Don’t you? The people behind eRepublik probably realized this when they were building their massive online multiplayer social strategy game.


Co-founder Alexis Bonte at Menora TechTalk 2008

Players can become journalists, politicians, soldiers, nurses, or whatnot, in different countries. Most of the fantasy societies are user-generated and players can either choose to play casually or for the money. Yet they have one thing in common, the time it takes them to play the game: 14 minutes a day.

The Madrid-based start-up is in a private beta since November 2007. Private is a very broad definition, as 395,000 users are testing the service.

Till today, the service took €200,000 in angel funding. But now they’ve closed another round and received €550,000 – mainly from French venture capital fund AGF Private Equity and a large group of business angels including the founders of Lastminute, Livra and Intellego. The co-founders Alexis Bonte and George Lemnaru will use the money to expand the game.

Erepublik received a honorable mention at the Le Web Start-up Competition last December. I think that was absolutely correct, considering the impressive number of users and the stickiness of the game.