ROCKETON, Inc., a venture-funded startup located in South San Francisco, has closed its Series B round of
financing with a $5 million investment from the D. E. Shaw group’s venture capital unit.  This funding brings total amount invested to $5.8 million. The company is building out a new type of virtual world that doesn’t exist on a single website, but, instead, is spread across the entire Internet.

"What would it be like if people could take a virtual world with them wherever they go on the Internet?" says Steven Hoffman, CEO of ROCKETON. "The answer we came up with is a parallel experience, where players rocket through cyberspace with their avatar and interact with virtual environments on almost every website they visit."

"What caught our attention about ROCKETON is the potential for a new, real-time social interaction between people online," says Michael Banks, a senior vice president of D. E. Shaw & Co., L.P.  "We asked ourselves, what if you took the next logical step beyond Facebook or Second Life?  How would that look?  The result is a new way of experiencing the Web."

ROCKETON is focused on the convergence of personalization of online identity, web-based community, and massively multiplayer online games. "We’re building games around social interaction," says Eric Hayashi, VP of
Business Development & Marketing at ROCKETON, "and weaving this into the fabric of the Web."

ROCKETON has an experienced management team that has worked at high-profile game publishers, including SEGA, Vivendi-Universal, Sony (SNE), Atari (ATAR), and Electronic Arts (ERTS).  The team has been quietly building out the technology and infrastructure for a parallel virtual world that spans the Web since May 2007.   The product is currently in closed alpha.