MENLO PARK, CA, Badgeville, The Social Loyalty Platform, today announced it has closed a $12 million Series B round led by Norwest Venture Partners (NVP) and El Dorado Ventures, with participation from existing institution Trinity Ventures and Webb Investment Network.

Badgeville's patent-pending Dynamic Game Engine and Widget Studio makes it easy for business leaders, smart marketers and innovative technologists to increase loyalty and lifetime user value with highly configurable, real-time, social rewards and analytics. With Badgeville, customers typically experience over 30% increases in key user-driven business objectives including visits, retention and conversions.

"This investment comes at the heels of two consecutive seven-figure sales quarters, and 40 percent quarter over quarter growth," said Badgeville CEO Kris Duggan. "We plan to use the new funding to continue to build out our team and to rapidly scale to meet broad market demand for social loyalty, behavior analytics, and smart gamification."

Badgeville launched at TechCrunch Disrupt last fall, where it took home the Audience Choice Award. The company's more than 75 customers come from industries across eCommerce, Media & Entertainment, Education, Fitness & Health, Services, and the Enterprise, including Discovery Communications, NBC, Bluefly.com, Interscope Records, Major League Gaming, LiveMocha, The Active Network, and Deloitte Digital.

"Based on learnings from our investments in Playdom and ngmoco, I've been actively speaking about the potential to leverage game mechanics in non-gaming industries for the past couple years, and have been seeking the right investment opportunity in gamification-as-a-SaaS offering," said Tim Chang, Partner at Norwest Venture Partners. "Badgeville is the clear emerging leader in this space, with the right enterprise-facing approach, business model and flexible platform to easily support a variety of real-world business needs across multiple verticals."

Norwest's Chang and Tom Peterson, Partner at El Dorado Ventures, joined Badgeville's board as part of this financing. With close to 30 employees, growing from the end of 2010, Badgeville plans to scale its team to 50 this year. Recent hires include social gaming, loyalty, and analytics experts from Zynga, Playdom, Omniture, Google and American Express. The company is headquartered in Menlo Park, Calif., and has offices In New York and Europe.

About Badgeville

Badgeville, the Social Loyalty Platform, makes it easy for business leaders, smart marketers and innovative technologists to increase user loyalty and engagement across eCommerce, Media & Entertainment, Health, Education, Services and Enterprise web & mobile experiences. Using Badgeville, brands can reward users with real-time achievements and reputation, while at the same time driving user behavior, achieving specific business goals, and measuring and optimizing user engagement. Badgeville customers include Discovery Communications, NBC, Bluefly, Interscope Records, Major League Gaming, Deloitte Digital, and The Active Network. Founded in 2010, Badgeville is based in Menlo Park, California and has offices in New York and Europe. For more information, visit Badgeville on the web @ www.badgeville.com

About Norwest Venture Partners

Norwest Venture Partners (NVP) is a global venture and growth equity investment firm that manages more than $3.7 billion in capital. Headquartered in Palo Alto, California, NVP has subsidiaries in Mumbai and Bengaluru, India and Herzelia, Israel. NVP makes early to late stage venture and growth equity investments in U.S. and global companies across a wide range of sectors including: information technology, business services, financial services, infrastructure, technology enabled services, healthcare and consumer. NVP has actively partnered with entrepreneurs to build great businesses for more than 50 years and has funded nearly 500 companies since inception.

Current and notable investments include Rackspace (NYSE:RAX), SideStep (acquired by Kayak), Playdom (acquired by TheWalt Disney Company), ngmoco (acquired by DeNA), Jigsaw (acquired by Salesforce.com), LifeSize Communications (acquired by Logitech), AdChina, TURN, Admeld, Basis, Bookrenter, BranchOut, Brand.net, Extole, Jiwire, Lashou, Lending Club, Lumos Labs, myYearbook.com, SocialVibe, The Dealmap, WhaleShark Media (parent company of RetailMeNot), Komli Media, Sulekha, and Yatra.com. For more information, please visit www.nvp.com.

About El Dorado Ventures

El Dorado Ventures (EDV) is a leading entrepreneur-focused, early-stage venture capital firm with over twenty-five years of success. Entrepreneurs see EDV as a trusted investment partner who shares their vision and helps them succeed by providing ongoing strategic guidance and access to a wealth of industry contacts. With $750 million in capital under management, the firm invests in disruptive technologies and business models in emerging and high-growth markets, across a broad range of sectors including software, technology-enabled services, communications and emerging technology. El Dorado's early-stage investments have included Compellent Technologies, Cyras Systems, EarthLink, Efficient Networks, Jigsaw, Novellus and NuSpeed Internet Systems. Numerous EDV portfolio companies have gone public or been acquired by major technology companies including AT&T, Ciena, Cisco Systems, Dell, nVidia, Salesforce.com, Siemens, Texas Instruments and Yahoo. For more information, please visit www.eldorado.com.

About Trinity Ventures

Founded in 1986, Trinity Ventures, a boutique firm, partners with passionate entrepreneurs to transform revolutionary ideas into reality. With over $1 billion under management, Trinity Ventures was founded on the principle of personal engagement and mutual respect with the entrepreneurs they fund. Trinity entures focuses on early stage technology ventures with a particular emphasis on digital media, eCommerce, cloud computing, Internet services, mobility, security and software markets.

Trinity Ventures has invested in such leading companies as Aruba Networks, 21Vianet, Blue Nile, LoopNet, Photobucket, SciQuest, Starbucks, Speedera Networks, BeachMint, 24/7 Media, Extreme Networks, Sygate, Wall Data,Trion Worlds and Infoblox. For more information, please visit www.trinityventures.com.