Mass High Tech

by Rodney H. Brown

Boston startup Nanigans Inc., barely a year old, has been chosen by Electronic Arts Inc. to supply its advertising platform for EA social games on Facebook, according to a release. In addition, Nanigans has raised $3 million in its first funding round, company officials said.

According to a company spokesperson, Nanigans took in funding from lead investor Avalon Ventures, with other investors including unnamed Boston-based angels as well as Rich Levandov, managing director at Avalon Ventures. Levandov, one of the initial backers of Facebook game studio Zynga, will join the Nanigans board in conjunction with the funding, the report stated.

In the EA deal, Playfish, a studio making social games that was recently acquired by EA to be its social games unit, selected the Nanigans advertising engine platform. According to the release, Playfish has already used the Nanigans platform on games such as Madden NFL Superstars, MONOPOLY  Millionaires and Restaurant City.

Nanigans was founded by CEO Ric Calvillo in February of 2010. Calvillo, a former EMC Corp. employee, was founder and CEO of Incipient  Inc., a venture-backed data storage infrastructure software company that was shut down in 2009 after selling its intellectual property assets to solid-state drive vendor Texas Memory Systems for undisclosed terms. Prior to Incipient, he founded and led Conley Corp., which was acquired by EMC in 1998.

Last month Nanigans relocated to new office space at 141 Tremont St. in Boston. The company, founded in February of 2010, now has 20 employees.