Wix.com Gets $3.5 from Mangrove and Bessemer

Wix.com announced today that it had raised $3.5 million from Mangrove Venture Capital and Bessemer Venture Partners. Wix is primarily a Web-based tool for users to create Flash content without having to work with Flash or HTML themselves and embed it in emails, websites, or social network profiles. It is, however, also getting into the virtual worlds space. In September, Cartoon Doll Emporium announced a partnership with Wix to build a new kids site, Mooyaka, about a girl whose emotions are embodied in the Wii's Mii-like characters. The plans then were to launch a games and community site in mid-October, build a community, and later develop it into a full virtual world. The current funding, on top of a previously raised $5 million, will go towards development and marketing.

“When you have casual games, there’s so much interest in people who just want to play a game for a few minutes,” CDE CEO Evan Bailyn told me in September. “Maybe they want to sign up and create a character to save in their profile, but maybe they don’t have time. We think the best way is to get them to create those avatars with us, and then we can contact them again. I think they’re waiting for that attention to turn on to convert to the resources to turn it in to a virtual world. This is going to be 3D, though, and they already have joints. We have it in mind from the beginning. We want to make sure the kids warm up to it and the characters.” [via DMW]