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Saints Capital takes stake in Second Life owner Linden Lab

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 1 min

second lifeSecondary investment firm Saints Capital has acquired a stake in virtual world startup Linden Lab, the owner of Second Life.

Venturewire reported that Saints Capital acquired the stake from an existing investor, and that Linden Lab was not involved in the transaction. That means that one of Linden Labs’ current investors or employee stakeholders sold the shares to Saints. Linden Lab declined comment.

Linden Lab has raised more than $19 million from investors including Benchmark Capital, Catamount Ventures, Globespan Capital Partners and Omidyar Network. Secondaries firm Stratim Capital acquired a small equity stake in the company in 2009.

Second Life launched in 2003 and has about a million monthly users. The number may be small, but it’s an active community. Second Life expects transactions between users to top $500 million this year. The company has more than 340 employees.

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Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat at VentureBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.