Corona Labs Inc.
Corona Labs Inc., formerly Ansca Mobile, is a California software company building a 2D game and app development platform. Its main offering is the Corona SDK, a cross-platform mobile development framework that builds native apps for iOS, Android, Kindle, Windows Phone, tvOS, Android TV and Mac and Windows desktop from a single code base. Corona Labs is based in Palo Alto, CA and is owned by Appodeal.
Company history
Corona Labs was founded as Ansca Mobile in 2008 by Carlos Icaza, previously the manager for such projects as Adobe's Flash Lite, Flash Mobile Authoring, Flash Cast and Adobe Illustrator, and Walter Luh, a lead architect in Adobe's Flash Lite team. In late 2009, Ansca secured $1 Million in Series A funding from Merus Capital, a venture capital firm founded by former Google and Microsoft executives.In December 2009, Ansca released the first version, Corona SDK, initially supporting iOS. In April 2010, they expanded support for the Android operating system. In 2011 Corona began supporting development for Amazon's Kindle Fire and the Barnes & Noble Nook.
In April 2012, CEO Icaza departed the company for personal reasons and CTO Luh took over the CEO role, and shortly after, in June of the same year, Ansca changed its name to Corona Labs.
In August 2012, Corona Labs introduced Corona Enterprise which allows developers to integrate any native Objective-C and Java library. Shortly after, in November of the same year, Corona Labs received $2 million in capital from Merus Capital and Western Technology Investment. In April 2013, Corona Labs expanded the company's product offerings with the launch of Corona SDK Starter, a free mobile development solution.
Fuse Powered acquisition
In November 2014, Fuse Powered Inc. acquired Corona Labs.The move is both a response to and a driver of competitive consolidation that is sweeping through the game monetization industry. Companies that grew up with one service, such as analytics, are finding that their customers want them to offer more than that. In similar moves, rival Unity Technologies acquired game services companies Playnomics and Applifier and Kontagent and PlayHaven merged to form Upsight.
“Over the past five years, we’ve built a very strong development platform and community,” said Walter Luh, the CEO of Corona Labs, in a statement. “In Fuse, we’ve found another company with the same vision to help mobile publishers make more successful games more easily. We will continue to build on the world-class Corona platform, and now our developers will also have amazing monetization and publishing tools at their disposal, with even more to come.”
Perk Inc. acquisition, split and pricing restructure
In December 2015, Perk.com Inc., a rewards program platform company, acquired Corona Labs for $2.3 Million.On September 15, 2016, Perk sold Corona Labs Inc to co-founder Roj Niyogi.
"In connection with the completion of the Transaction, Mr. Niyogi returned to Perk for cancellation 1,879,532 common shares and 1,505,972 Class A restricted voting shares in the capital of Perk representing all of the shares held by Mr. Niyogi in Perk and Perk paid to Mr. Niyogi aggregate cash proceeds of USD$1,750,000. Additionally, over the 12 month period following closing of the Transaction, Perk will pay up to a maximum of USD$750,000 in services to help facilitate the transition of Corona’s operations to Mr. Niyogi."
Ted Hastings, Chief Executive Officer of Perk, stated: “We acquired Corona last year with the goal of getting access to a large pool of third party app developers to rapidly extend our Perk platform. We integrated our platform earlier in 2016 and as the competition for mobile development engines accelerated we looked at strategic options that would allow both Perk and Corona to thrive given the increased investment required for Corona. We are very pleased with the agreement we completed with Roj for several reasons - most importantly it will allow both Perk and Corona to focus and invest appropriately. Perk is able to continue to distribute our rewards platform through Corona through an exclusive partnership while redeploying the previous investment in Corona, which was in excess of USD$1,000,000 on a quarterly basis towards accelerated sales and marketing efforts that will improve Perk’s business fundamentals. I’d like to thank Roj for his contribution to Perk from co-founding the business to leading Corona as a global mobile development engine.”
On December 19, 2016, retired their ad platform, Corona Ads, announced a subscription based ad plugin model on its product with announcement of the Corona Professional Bundle.
"Corona Ads was initiated earlier this year as an alternative to limited ad-based monetization options at the time. Since its conception, we’ve added numerous monetization options to the Corona Marketplace that we believe are strong solutions for Corona developers — these include popular networks like AppLovin, mediation providers like Appodeal, and child-friendly providers like KIDOZ and SuperAwesome, making Corona the leader in easy-to-implement monetization solutions."
Appodeal acquisition, pricing restructure, and major platform announcement
On March 16, 2017, Appodeal, an aggrogate ad platform company, announced that it has acquired Corona Labs. The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed."As a result of the deal, Appodeal says the enterprise version of the Corona framework will be made available for free, and that the framework will also become open source. At the same time, developers building on Corona won’t be limited to Appodeal — they’ll still be able to use any monetization platform that was previously supported, with the Corona team working to build even more ad partnerships."
“We decided to make even more of the Corona platform free because we believe that there should be more opportunities to develop mobile games of high quality on the market,” said Appodeal founder and CEO Pavel Golubev in the acquisition release. “Additionally, Corona will gradually be transformed into an open-source framework with the first components released as open-source soon after the acquisition formalities are complete.”
Niyogi said he will remain involved as a strategic advisor, while the Corona engineering team joins Appodeal.