Corona Labs Inc., formerly Ansca Mobile, was a software company based in

Palo Alto, California Palo Alto (; Spanish for "tall stick") is a charter city in the northwestern corner of Santa Clara County, California, United States, in the San Francisco Bay Area, named after a coastal redwood tree known as El Palo Alto. The city was ...

, best known for building a 2D game and app development platform. Its most popular product was the Corona SDK, a cross-platform mobile development framework that builds native apps for

iOS iOS (formerly iPhone OS) is a mobile operating system created and developed by Apple Inc. exclusively for its hardware. It is the operating system that powers many of the company's mobile devices, including the iPhone; the term also include ...

Android Android may refer to: Science and technology * Android (robot), a humanoid robot or synthetic organism designed to imitate a human * Android (operating system), Google's mobile operating system ** Bugdroid, a Google mascot sometimes referred to ...

Amazon Kindle Amazon Kindle is a series of e-readers designed and marketed by Amazon. Amazon Kindle devices enable users to browse, buy, download, and read e-books, newspapers, magazines and other digital media via wireless networking to the Kindle Stor ...

Windows Phone Windows Phone (WP) is a discontinued family of mobile operating systems developed by Microsoft for smartphones as the replacement successor to Windows Mobile and Zune. Windows Phone featured a new user interface derived from the Metro design lan ...

tvOS tvOS (formerly known as Apple TV Software) is an operating system developed by Apple Inc. for the Apple TV, a digital media player. In the first-generation Apple TV, Apple TV Software was based on Mac OS X. Starting with the second-generatio ...

Android TV Android TV is a smart TV operating system based on Android and developed by Google for television sets, digital media players, set-top boxes, and soundbars. A successor to Google TV, it features a user interface designed around content discover ...

, and

Mac Mac or MAC most commonly refers to: * Mac (computer), a family of personal computers made by Apple Inc. * Mackintosh, a raincoat made of rubberized cloth * A variant of the word macaroni, mostly used in the name of the dish mac and cheese * Mac, ...

and

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for ...

desktops from a single code base. Corona products use the programming language

Lua Lua or LUA may refer to: Science and technology * Lua (programming language) * Latvia University of Agriculture * Last universal ancestor, in evolution Ethnicity and language * Lua people, of Laos * Lawa people, of Thailand sometimes referred t ...

. The company changed hands several times before closing on May 1, 2020.

History

Corona Labs was founded as Ansca Mobile in 2008 by Carlos Icaza, who previously oversaw projects such as

Macromedia Macromedia, Inc., was an American graphics, multimedia, and web development software company (1992–2005) headquartered in San Francisco, California, that made products such as Flash and Dreamweaver. It was purchased by its rival Adobe System ...

Flash Lite Adobe Flash Lite (formerly Macromedia Flash Lite) was a lightweight version of Adobe Flash Player, a software application published by Adobe Systems for viewing Flash content. Flash Lite operates on devices that Flash Player cannot, such as mob ...

and

Adobe Illustrator Adobe Illustrator is a vector graphics editor and design program developed and marketed by Adobe Inc. Originally designed for the Apple Macintosh, development of Adobe Illustrator began in 1985. Along with Creative Cloud (Adobe's shift to month ...

, and Walter Luh, the leading architect on the Flash Lite team. The name Ansca was inspired by Icaza's childhood in a cooperative agricultural community in

Nicaragua Nicaragua (; ), officially the Republic of Nicaragua (), is the largest Sovereign state, country in Central America, bordered by Honduras to the north, the Caribbean Sea, Caribbean to the east, Costa Rica to the south, and the Pacific Ocean to ...

; there, ANSCA was the Algodoneros Nicaragüenses Sociedad Cooperativa Agrícola, or the Nicaraguan Cotton-Workers Agricultural Cooperative Society. Ansca closed a $1 million

Series A funding A series A round (also known as series A financing or series A investment) is the name typically given to a company's first significant round of venture capital financing. The name refers to the class of preferred stock sold to investors in exchan ...

deal on September 9, 2009 after receiving support from

venture capital Venture capital (often abbreviated as VC) is a form of private equity financing that is provided by venture capital firms or funds to start-up company, startups, early-stage, and emerging companies that have been deemed to have high growth poten ...

firm Merus Capital. That December, Ansca released the first version of Corona SDK, a

software development kit A software development kit (SDK) is a collection of software development tools in one installable package. They facilitate the creation of applications by having a compiler, debugger and sometimes a software framework. They are normally specific ...

that was used to create apps such as '' The Lost City'', ''

Bubble Ball Bubble Ball is a physics puzzle game created by American developer Robert Nay when he was 14 years old. It was released on December 22, 2010 and in its first two weeks was downloaded 2 million times from Apple iTunes. On January 8, 2011, Coron ...

'' (created by 14-year old Robert Nay), and ''

Dabble ''Dabble'' is an anagram word game designed by George Weiss, who was 84 years old at the time, and published by INI, LLC in 2011. An app version was Kotaku ''Kotaku'' is a video game website and blog that was originally launched in 2004 as p ...

'' (created by 84-year old George Weiss). SDK initially supported iOS only but quickly expanded to support Android systems. The following year, Amazon's

Kindle Fire The Amazon Fire, formerly called the Kindle Fire, is a line of tablet computers developed by Amazon. Built with Quanta Computer, the Kindle Fire was first released in November 2011, featuring a color 7-inch multi-touch display with IPS te ...

and the

Barnes & Noble Nook The Barnes & Noble Nook (styled nook or NOOK) is a brand of e-readers developed by American book retailer Barnes & Noble, based on the Android platform. The original device was announced in the U.S. in October 2009, and was released the next ...

were supported as well. By 2012, Corona had 15 employees. That April, Icaza departed the company for personal reasons and Luh took over as CEO; in June, Ansca became Corona Labs. In August, after receiving $2 million in funding from investors, the company released Corona Enterprise, which allows developers to integrate any native Objective-C and Java library. In December, they acquired the

Dubai Dubai (, ; ar, دبي, translit=Dubayy, , ) is the most populous city in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and the capital of the Emirate of Dubai, the most populated of the 7 emirates of the United Arab Emirates.The Government and Politics ...

-based Game Minion, a company working on similar projects. They combined to create Corona Cloud, launched in 2015, which "allowed developers to more easily add features like leaderboards, achievements, chat and more to their mobile games." Corona SDK Starter's launch in April 2013 expanded SDK's available tools and became the lowest tier with limited tools available for free under SDK Pro and SDK Enterprise. The Toronto-based mobile monetization firm Fuse Powered, Inc. acquired Corona in fall 2014. Acquisitions and mergers were happening frequently within the game monetization industry at this time, with competitors

Unity Technologies Unity Software Inc. (doing business as Unity Technologies) is a video game software development company based in San Francisco. It was founded in Denmark in 2004 as Over the Edge Entertainment (OTEE) and changed its name in 2007. Unity Technolo ...

acquiring Playnomics and Applifier, and Kontagent and PlayHaven merging to form Upsight. In a public statement about the acquisition, Luh said that adding Fuse's skillsets to Corona's allowed their "developers... amazing monetization and publishing tools at their disposal, with even more to come." By 2014, SDK was being used by more than 300,000 game developers worldwide. In December 2015, just over a year later, Corona Labs was bought by rewards program platform Perk.com, Inc. for $2.3 million. In September of the following year, the company was again sold, this time to Perk co-founder Roj Niyogi, for his shares in Perk, $1.7 million in aggregate cash, and up to $750,000 to facilitate the transfer. Corona Ads, a monetization option later made redundant by the addition of other monetization features, was replaced with the Corona Professional Bundle, a subscription-based ad plugin model. Corona again changed hands in March 2017, this time to the ad platform management company Appodeal. That June, the Corona framework was made free, and all Corona products moving forward were consolidated into a collective product, simply called "Corona." In 2019, Corona's game engine became

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

. In February 2020, Corona announced that it would be closing on May 1, with any remaining products to be released under an open-source license. In April 2020, the engine was renamed from Corona SDK to

Solar2D Solar2D (formerly Corona SDK) is a free and open-source, cross-platform software development kit originally developed by Corona Labs Inc. and now maintained by Vlad Shcherban. Released in late 2009, it allows software programmers to build 2D mobi ...

References

{{reflist Software companies based in California Companies based in Palo Alto, California 2008 establishments in California Defunct software companies of the United States 2020 disestablishments in California