Supercell, a Helsinki, Finland-based company which merges social games with elements from traditional console titles, has raised a $130 million round of funding co-led by Institutional Venture Partners and Index Ventures. Also joining the round was Atomico Ventures. The company was co-founded by CEO Ilkka Paananen, a longtime director at mobile gaming startup Digital Chocolate.

Just six Brazilian tech startups landed venture capital investments in 2009, but that number grew to 17 in 2010 and to 45 last year, according to Diogo Gomes, an online entrepreneur and blogger based in Brazil.

Today’s slideshow takes a look at the rising Finnish tech stars who have secured venture funding over the last year.

The computer game Angry Birds will become a live attraction for children next year when the first Angry Birds playgrounds appear in Finland, writes Reuters Life. Mobile gaming firm Rovio, which owns the hit game, earlier this year raised $42 million from venture capital firms including Accel Partners, which previously backed Facebook and Baidu, and [...]

(Reuters) – Mobile gaming company Rovio Entertainment said on Wednesday its hit game Angry Birds had reached a record 500 million downloads in less than two years since its launch.

“It’s more than any game ever before,” Rovio’s marketing chief Peter Vesterbacka told a conference in Helsinki.

Unlike most mobile-game crazes, Angry Birds — in which players use a slingshot to attack pigs who steal the birds’ eggs — has stayed at the top of the charts since it was launched for Apple’s iPhone on Dec. 11, 2009.

Vesterbacka said the company’s next aim was to reach 1 billion fans …

PARIS (Reuters) – Mikael Hed is unrepentant about the 200 million minutes per day that people around the world fritter away playing Angry Birds, the iPhone game created by the company he heads.

“It’s great. Think of all the other stuff they could be doing that’s so much more boring,” said the CEO of Rovio Mobile, a Finnish startup almost unheard of before it unleashed the addictive game on an unsuspecting world in 2009. Hed spoke at the Reuters Global Technology Summit in Paris this week.

Angry Birds, the most popular paid-for game in the Apple App Store’s four-year history, has just passed 200 million downloads.

The deceptively simple puzzle game in which players use a slingshot to fire birds at green pigs hiding in buildings has hooked a whole new audience, many of whom were never interested in video games before.

“These new touchscreen portable devices have changed the way that people behave,” said Hed (pictured). “Nowadays, people have to be

Rovio, the Finnish developer of the ‘Angry Birds’ smart phone game, has raised $42 million from Accel Partners, Skyp co-founder Niklas Zennstroem’ fund Atomico Ventures, and angel investor Felicis Ventures, Reuters reported. Accel Partners led the round, which is designed to help Rovio expand across markets including mobile, social media and other platforms, and via merchandising and media production and partnerships, Reuters wrote.

On demand social music service Rdio has raised $17.5 million in venture capital from investors including Mangrove Capital Partners, venture fund Atomico, Skype and other investors including company co-founder Janus Friis. Rdio will use this infusion of cash to expand its footprint to new platforms, and also to expanding its team. Rdio is based in San Francisco.

MadBid.com, a London-based pay-to-play auction site, has raised £4 million in Series A funding from Atomico Ventures.

Atomico Ventures, a European VC fund run by Skype co-founder Niklas Zennström, today announced that it has closed its second fund — and first institutional one — with $165 million in capital commitments. So we spent some time on the phone this morning with Zennström, in order to learn more about the fundraise and the state of European venture capital.

Last May, Atomico said in an SEC filing that it was looking to raise up to $266 million. Why did you close on so much less?

I wouldn’t say we closed on much less. The thing our lawyers told was was that we needed to set a limit in the SEC filing, because if we went above it we’d have to do another filing. So we basically put a high number with a really big buffer. The reality is that, with the kind of investments we’re looking at, you don’t want to have too big of a fund.