Ignite Game Technologies, the gaming company creating a completely new online racing experience, today announced it received $5 million in Series C funding from a combination of existing and new private investors. This takes the total raised by the San Francisco-based start-up to $17.5 million following two successful rounds of funding in 2010 and 2011.

The company, which also welcomes Dave Marrs to its board of investors, unveiled the public beta of its highly-anticipated racing game, Simraceway™ (http://simraceway.com/), in November 2011. In the same month, it also debuted a one-of-a-kind racing controller, the Simraceway S1 Steering Wheel, which it developed in conjunction with leading peripherals manufacturer SteelSeries®.

Ignite will use this newly-acquired capital to build on its successful software and hardware launches and fully realize the vision of founders James Synge and Jonathan Haswell by making Simraceway the most authentic, immersive, and inclusive racing simulator on the market. Simraceway racers can expect to see:

"We've always firmly believed that investors and players alike would share our vision for the online racing space," said Ignite CEO Jonathan Haswell. "But when we set out in 2008 to chart a new course for the genre, creating an authentic experience that brought together not only the world's best racers, tracks, and cars but also players of every ability, we couldn't have hoped for more wholehearted belief and support from the investment community and from online racing fans."

About Ignite Game Technologies

Ignite Game Technologies is a Silicon Valley-based online gaming company founded in 2008 by skill-quantification experts Jonathan Haswell and James Synge to produce a new kind of racing game, Simraceway, launched in public beta in November 2011. The company counts four-time IndyCar Series winner Dario Franchitti among its physics development team and benefited greatly from the expertise of double Indy 500 winner Dan Wheldon before his death in 2011. It also has the distinction of being able to leverage a permanent real-world racing facility-the Simraceway Performance Driving Center, based at Infineon Raceway-for R&D. To date Ignite has raised $17.5 million.

About Simraceway

Simraceway is an online racing world that offers live, person-to-person racing, utilizing highly-accurate, simulation-grade driving physics. It leverages a client-server model similar to those on popular online games such as World of Warcraft™ and features current and historic licensed content from a variety of auto and racing brands including Bentley™, Bugatti™, Mitsubishi™ and Saleen™. Its continually-evolving racing environment is constantly supplemented with new features and content to fully reflect the fast-moving, real-world motor racing scene.