Photo Credit: Daniela Hartmann via Compfight

By Wired Academic Staff

New York & London-based startup Mindshapes landed another $4 million in funding from Index Ventures, Richmond Park Partners and existing ventures as it aims to keep growing in the educational app space.

“We see interactive fiction and education products for both kids and adults as massive opportunities,” said Ben Homes, a partner at Index Ventures. The company secured $5 million in funding last November from Angel investors and its founders.

The company launched its Magic Town virtual world site on May 16, which features 70 popular picture books including Elmer, Little Princess and Aliens Love Underpants. It plans to launch an iPad and iPhone app for the product this summer. The game for kids ages 2-6 uses stories licensed from 15 large children’s book publishers including Hachette Group, Simon & Schuster and Penguin Group. The company aims to have 200 books in the virtual world by the end of 2012.

Mindshapes plans a new game called Language City that targets 16 to 30-year-olds who want to improve their conversational English abilities by creating a game environment with comedy and quirky characters. The company said  its first game, Language City London, will launch this summer and it plans to add other cities and languages down the road.

Mindshapes was founded in 2010 by Chairman Shukri Shammas (co-founder of Macrospace and Playfish), CEO David Begg (co-founder of Active Hotels and Tom Dixon), CTO Sami Lababidi (co-founder of Macrospace and Playfish), CCO Christian Dorffer, and CFO Tareq Naqib. The company aims to change the way children and adults learn through interactive game-play. It has produced nine educational apps on the IOS platform for iPads, iPhones and iPods.