Social location-based game SCVNGR announced in a blog post it has raised $15M in its third round of funding. Barry Maloney from Balderton Capital led the round which also involved Google Ventures and Highland Capital Partners.

SCVNGR had raised a total of $20 million to date, and the Cambridge, Massachusetts- based company’s apps attracted 1 million users within the first 20 weeks after their debut. According to ‘chief ninja’ of SCVNGR Seth Priebatsch, the $15M raised in funding will be used to further accelerate the company’s and the game’s growth.

“Priebatsch said the capital will support the 51-employee company’s growth, and will also be spent on exploring international opportunities and the development of further game mechanics that can make the apps more fun, rewarding and entertaining. The app will also soon come to the BlackBerry platform.”

In our previous coverage of SCVNGR we discussed the hyper-local, social-gaming hybrid app in more detail.

The developing interest in location-aware services – and evidently games – is becoming more and more prominent lately, and SCVNGER is not the only who is attempting to tap this market. Other examples include Foursquare, whose recent features addition we covered here; Gowalla who recently announced the service’s 3^rd version release and Facebook Places, which we covered recently here.