Kirkland North Lands $225k For Campus Domination With Online "Risk" Game

Kirkland North, a startup out of Yale, recently landed $225,000 in seed funding from Harrison Metal Capital to continue their expansion and domination on college campuses. The "Risk" like game pins college students and schools against one another on an online landscape that requires strategic maneuvers to take over territories, forge allies, and conquer enemies. From what I hear, the game is pretty addicting.

The war game, called Turf, was originally started by Gabe Smedresman as a fun experiment. It quickly caught on and attracted over 3,300 students, or about 25% of the Yale student body. Soon after, it got picked up by Y Combinator and joined its incubator program. Rivals from Yale and Harvard not only battled on the online war field, but also on the startup front, as several Harvard students started their own game called GoCrossCampus. They have been battling ever since over who was the real founder. TechCrunch has covered the rivalry in more detail.

I met Brad Hargreaves, Isaac Silverman, and M. Owen Brimer (co-founders of GoCrossCampus) when they came to pitch at Boston College. At the time, it didn't seem like there was a concrete plan for a viable revenue model. But, they did say that they planned on expanding to offer games to corporate companies to help foster team building and collaboration, which the game naturally fosters. Both startups could take this angle and somehow integrate their platform with job training. They could also host sponsored games or add educational lessons to target parents and classroom to generate additional revenue streams.

We covered GoCrossCampus earlier on a previous post. You can play Kirkland North's game at PlayTurf.net or GoCrossCampus here.

Via: VentureBeat

Follow College Mogul on Twitter.