RockYou gets $10M from SoftBank as part of Asian expansion

Social apps publisher RockYou said today that it has raised $10 million in funding from SoftBank and it has acquired a majority of the shares in its joint venture RockYou Asia.

The deal is similar to an upcoming one that SoftBank is preparing to announce with Zynga, the top social game company on Facebook. It allows SoftBank to participate in the increasingly popular global social games market.

The $10 million financing is a fifth round of funding for Redwood City, Calif.-based RockYou, which previously raised a $50 million fourth round from SoftBank in November. Full told, RockYou has raised $127 million from investors including Sequoia Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Partech International, DCM and SK Telecom.

RockYou said it has been working with a number of game developers throughout Asia to monetize, license and publish its social games on a global scale. The company says it has had success in Japan, Korea and China and further plans to expand in Asia.

“We’ve always been very excited about the Asia market and believe that the market for social applications will really heat up in the coming months,” said Jia Shen, founder of RockYou. “With the further alignment between RockYou and RockYou Asia we can have an increasingly significant impact on the Asia social gaming market and further engage the world through social media.”

RockYou has more than 280 million monthly active users worldwide. Those users generate 15 billion monthly impressions as they play games such as Hugme, Likeness, Pieces of Flair, Speedracing and others. RockYou’s games and other apps are available on Facebook, MySpace, Hi5, Friendster, Orkut, and Bebo.