Infographic: Zynga's Path to IPO

Immediately after Zynga filed for its IPO on Friday afternoon, Namesake released the infographic displayed below. Called the "Path to IPO," the graphic charts Zynga's meteoric rise since it was founded in 2007 by Mark Pincus, who was largely shunned in Silicon Valley because of his management style, and a handful of friends.

Over the past four years, the social games developer has released some of the most popular virtual experiences we've ever seen. Today, the company has hundreds of millions of active monthly users who purchase enough virtual goods and are valued highly enough by advertisers to push the valuation of Zynga to somewhere between $10 billion and $20 billion.

Infographics are always a bit of a hodgepodge of statistics culled from a variety of sources. Here, we sort through the clutter and pull out some of our favorite facts and figures:

• Founded in 2007 as a social games developer, Zynga has already grown to more than 1,300 employees and 279 million active monthly users.
• Before its IPO, Zynga had raised more than $500 million in funding, starting with an investment from Reid Hoffman. Other investors include Kleiner Perkins, Foundry Group, Soft Bank, Google, Andreessen Horowitz and others.
• In just two years, the game developer has acquired 15 different game studios and products. Whether to amass more talent or scale to new locations around the country, Zynga's corporate development team has kept busy.
• In 2010, Zynga purchased Conduit Labs for an undisclosed sum. The social music game creator boasted former employees from the developer or Guitar Hero and Rock Band. The acquisition was used to launch a satellite office in Boston.
• Out of the top 10 Facebook apps as determined by the number of monthly active users, Zynga has created four: CityVille, FarmVille, Texas HoldEm Poker and Empires & Allies.
• The bulk of the social game creator's revenue is linked to the sale of virtual goods on Facebook and other platforms. The U.S. virtual goods market is expected to reach $2.1 billion in revenue this year, up 40 percent from last year.

Check out more Infographics on the Technology Channel.