Brian Wong, the youngest student to graduate from the Sauder School of Business’s BCom program at 18 years of age, is now the youngest entrepreneur to raise venture capital funding.
Wong, now 19, attracted a $200,000-plus injection from True Ventures, an American firm that supports early stage entrepreneurs, to develop an advertising platform for mobile gaming called Kiip.me.
This comes after launching the innovative Twitter tool FollowFormation and holding a position at Digg.com, where he helped bring that company's Android application to market.
"I'm pumped," says Wong to the Vancouver Sun about his latest venture. "I decided to jump out and do the risky thing.”
Kiip.me focuses on providing game developers with a way to reach consumers in the rapidly-developing mobile gaming market and monetize without comprising the gamer experience.
“I spent a few weeks deciding whether or not to join another company and ended up realizing now is the time," he told the Sun. "There was this idea that was burning a hole in my head."
Wong is a year younger than Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who famously raised early capital for his now ubiquitous online social media platform. “People start thinking of me as the next Zuckerberg,” Wong told the Wall Street Journal. “I can use that to my advantage.”
