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September 05, 2006
Miyowa More Mobile Instant Messaging
Miyowa, a 3-year old French provider of mobile messaging services, has raised €3M from Techfund and Sophia Europlab. Update: TechCrunch wrote in to say that they broke the news yesterday about Miyowa's funding, before the firm issued its communique, which we received this morning. See link to TechCrunch's scoop below.
Miyowa runs mobile instant messaging services for the likes of MSN Live Messenger in France, Skyrock (a French radio station with a large blogging community), and Silicon Valley-based mobile games developer, Digital Chocolate. It also supports Hotmail, the MSN email service, on the mobilephone. Its services are a key part of the business model of France's new MVNO operator CGBC, which runs the TEN brand, and is backed by AXA Private Equity.
Miyowa's plan is to use the capital to develop better mobile "community" services.
This one looks a lot like Mangrove-backed Nimbuzz. Although positioned differently, Miyowa offers pretty much the same things, except it's doing it as a white label service. Another potential competitor would be Swiss startup Vipera, backed by business angels, but Vipera is not as far into commercialization as either of these two.
Rodrigo has a video clip of an interview he did with Miyowa's founder. See link below.
Read - La société française Miyowa lève 3 millions d’euros (TechCrunch Francaise)
Read - Pascal Lorne (Rodrigo Sepulveda Schulz blog)
Read - IM mobile : le français Miyowa lève 3 millions d'euros (NetEconomie )
Posted on September 5, 2006 02:19 PM | Posted to Venture Capital | Wireless | Permalink
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