Investors value student startup at $20M

College freshman Monica Kwok is looking to establish herself as a proprietor of female entrepreneurship.

Kwok — who founded the Monumentality clothing line this fall — is also launching the video game company Playzon Interactive next year.

An angel investor has valued her company at $20 million, Kwok said. Playzon’s first video game, Conflict Orion, will be released in January.

Kwok and co-founder Jonathan LaCour, a Loyola Law School graduate, began working on Playzon in September of this year. Kwok describes her company as a “publisher and developer for next-generation video games.” Playzon will create products that “appear lifelike and have 3-D navigation” — essentially a much enhanced gaming experience than Farmville on Facebook, Kwok explained.

Playzon’s technology is “revolutionary” in that “anyone with access to the internet … will be able to play these games straight from the browser without downloading a program,” Kwok said.

LaCour added that Playzon hopes to make “high production value video games accessible to the masses.”

Customers will also be able to download the free game onto new mobile technology, such as iPods, Android phones, iPads, Kindles and personal computers.

Playzon’s plans to produce “combat games of Halo-3 caliber” to target the primary gaming audience of 18- to 35-year-old men, Kwok said.

Though Kwok does not consider herself a particularly avid gamer, she does call herself a “renaissance woman” and does not limit herself in seeking out potential business ventures.

She and Lacour “built the company infrastructure” and assembled a team of 12 “tech-savvy people” from across the world to execute the mechanics behind Playzon, Kwok explained.

“Startups are about using the resources around you,” and the internet facilitates the creation of connections, she said.

Kwok added that Playzon has “obtained a verbal agreement from an investor” and is in talks with various venture capitalists, but have yet to secure funding.

Kwok sees Rumble, another gaming platform as a competitor. It is currently valued at $55 million, she said.

She does not seem concerned about competitors like Rumble. “I think we’re going to have a much larger user base just because we are coming out with our game first,” she said.

This article has been changed from a prior version. It also has altered to reflect that an angel investor valued the startup at $20 million, not Kwok.

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