March 20, 2008
London's Spinvox Socks Away $100M Investment
Goldman Sachs together with GLG Partners, Blue Mountain Capital Management and Toscafund Asset Management have invested $100M in London-based Spinvox, which converts voice mail to email. This third round of funding gives SpinVox a valuation greater than $500M. Spinvox had previously raised $100M.
SpinVox has deals with 12 cell phone carriers led by Canada's Rogers Mobile and Alltel Wireless.
$200M invested in a startup led by a 31 year old is a big bet. But CEO and founder Christina Domecq appears confident. (She is an American-educated member of the Domecq sherry dynasty.) And apparently Spinvox has won in the hundreds of thousands of users who have brought the company close to break-even despite a three hundred person head count.
View - site
Posted at 10:44 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
November 28, 2007
SimulScribe: What Your VC Is Reading On His Blackberry
We had a chance to talk with the Founder and CEO of SimulScribe, James Siminoff, today who got in touch because he claims VCs are some of his best clients. SimulScribe transcribes voice mails to emails so that VCs, who are stuck in meeting rooms at least a few hours a day, can get their voice mails on their Blackberrys.
UPDATE: Simulscribe has offered a free 30 day trial to ac readers.
Siminoff told us that his startup has been growing through word of mouth and expects to take in about $1M in revenue this year. But he also said that he got a marketing offer that he could not refuse. A SimulScribe user in LA who had launched an outdoor advertising company running small billboards on top of New York City cabs, offered a massive taxi-based marketing blitz for free in exchange for a small amount of equity in SimulScribe. Working with Big Fish Communications, Simulscribe got its "Voice Mail Sucks" message on 4% - or about 500 - of New York's taxis. In conjunction with that event, Simulscribe ran a media stunt in New York for press and bloggers that was a game in which participants had to down a shot when a taxi passes with SimulScribe's slogan.
SimulScribe offers a two-week free trial on its Web site. After that, its pricing is $9.95 a month, with 40 transcribed messages, and each additional transcription is 25 cents. Unlimited service is available for $29.95 a month.
Simulscribe has taken a sick amount of free TV, print and blogger attention
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Posted at 11:21 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
November 26, 2007
e911 No Joke: Vixxi Funded To Sell Emergency Service To VoIP
We have to count ourselves as among those who under-estimated the hassle of VoIP 411. It really has been a hardship for VoIP companies. Here comes Vixxi Solutions out of Irving, TX which has raised $4M to fix the bug. Vixxi sells e911 solutions to VoIP providers and carriers. Vixxi says it provides 100% geographical coverage in the US, Canada and Puerto Rico. Vixxi is majority owned by Spatial Data. Backers include ComVentures and Trident Capital.
So what's the problem here? Let's say you are kidnapped and make a 911 call via your VoIP line but the bad guy hangs up on you. Your local police don't know where you are to rescue you. Bummer. It's also a bummer for your VoIP provider who is required by law to know where you are. With a service like Vixxi, the e911 emergency-calling system automatically associates a physical address with the calling party's telephone number.
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November 15, 2007
Voice-Over-Salesforce's Ribbit Raises Funds
Pre-launch Ribbit says it has raised an undisclosed amount of funding for its voice technology that works with Salesforce.com. Ribbit develops software that integrates cell calls with Salesforce.com applications. So you can attach a voice message from a sales prospect to a Salesforce task and store it for later playback.
Ribbit was founded in November 2006 by Ramani Narayan, who was a co-founder and Syndeo.
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Posted at 08:07 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
November 13, 2007
Vivox: "Never Die While Typing Again!"
Vivox sells a voice interaction platform so that when you are blasting away at some terrorists you have trapped in a cave you can trash talk them. The firm's value prop to gamers is "Never Die While Typing Again!"
Social networks and other communities can also use Vivox. You can see Vivox at work in the game PokerManager as well as in Pixel Mine's FireTeam: Reloaded, Wizards of the Coast and in Second Life.
Founded by VoIP omni-presence Jeff Pulver, Framingham, MA-based Vivox has just closed $7.8M in Series B funding led by Benchmark Capital and joined by return backers Canaan Partners and GrandBanks Capital.
View - site
Vivox Inc., a Framingham, Mass.-based provider of VoIP services for online games and virtual worlds, has raised $7.8 million in Series B funding. Benchmark Capital led the round, and was joined by return backers Canaan Partners and GrandBanks Capital.
PRESS RELEASE
Vivox, the leading provider of integrated voice services for online games and virtual worlds, today announced that it has secured $7.8 million in a second round of equity financing. Benchmark Capital led the round. Strong support was also received from the Company's existing investors, Canaan Partners and GrandBanks Capital.
"The proliferation of virtual worlds and online games has created a tremendous opportunity for the Vivox communications platform," said Mitch Lasky, general partner of Benchmark Capital and newly appointed Vivox board member. "Voice is a transformative feature in games, creating an entirely new level of engagement and social connection among players. Vivox is uniquely positioned to deliver scalable, carrier-grade voice services through its industry-leading technologies and expertise."
"We are incredibly excited to have Benchmark Capital and Mitch Lasky involved with Vivox," said Rob Seaver, founder and CEO of Vivox. "Benchmark's clear visions and track record in the sector, and Mitch's successful background in senior roles with Disney, Activision, JAMDAT and Electronic Arts are tremendous assets to Vivox."
"Vivox's technology and operational expertise have established them as a unique service in the market," said Ryan Moore, general partner and member of the Vivox Board from GrandBanks Capital. "We see first-hand the positive impact Vivox has on online games and virtual worlds with operational excellence and innovative functionality and have no doubt they will continue to play a major role in shaping online communities."
Proceeds from the round will fund product development, sales support and marketing as the Company extends its technology and market lead. Vivox offers the only integrated platform and managed service available today to enable online games and virtual worlds to connect their communities with cutting edge features and functionality on a massive scale.
"We continue to invest in digital media companies that are changing the way people work and live," said Warren Lee, Vivox board member and principal at Canaan Partners. "We're thrilled to invest again in Vivox and believe the company is poised for tremendous growth in the rapidly expanding gaming and virtual world market."
Vivox customers and partners include online game and virtual world leaders 1GPN, Inc., Alpha Innovation, BigWorld Technology, CCP Games, The Electric Sheep Company, FWD International, IBM, Icarus Studios, Illusion Factory, K2 Network, LanguageLab.com, Linden Lab, Monumental Games, Pixel Mine and Wizards of the Coast.
About Vivox
Vivox provides online games, virtual worlds, and online communities with managed voice communication services that are simple to integrate and enhance game play and community. Vivox's carrier-grade, customizable solutions help online games and communities create improved offerings and extend their user base. Today, Vivox is bringing voice to customers with millions of subscribers in more than 180 countries. For more information visit: www.vivox.com .
About Benchmark Capital
Benchmark Capital, a leading international venture capital firm, was founded in 1995 to help talented entrepreneurs with original ideas build successful technology companies. Benchmark's general partners take a team-oriented, labor-intensive approach to venture investing to deliver a superior level of service to the firm's portfolio companies. Benchmark's portfolio includes high-profile start-ups like Infinera, MySQL, OpenTable, Second Life, Tellme, Yelp, and Zillow, and franchise companies such as eBay, Juniper Networks and Red Hat. The firm manages more than USD 2.4 billion in committed venture capital. For more information on Benchmark Capital, visit its website at www.benchmark.com .
About Canaan Partners
Canaan Partners invests in visionary entrepreneurs and provides them the networks, insights and operational guidance required to build high-performance technology and healthcare companies. For 20 years, they have taken an active and committed role in the companies in which they invest, and have completed more than 67 mergers and acquisitions and 51 IPOs. With $2.3 billion under management and a worldwide footprint, the firm's technology team is committed to catalyzing the growth of innovative companies in the digital media, communications & mobility, enterprise and clean tech industries. Among its successes are DoubleClick, the leading online advertising solution, Match.com, the most popular online dating site in the world, CommerceOne, the company that pioneered and brought B2B ecommerce to the masses; Capstone Turbine, first to market and world's leading producer of commercially viable microturbine energy products; and VOIP equipment supplier Acme Packet, which was one of the top ten performing IPOs of 2006. Other Canaan technology investments include SuccessFactors, Active Networks, Blurb, Dexterra, Tremor Media and GroundWorks. Canaan has offices in California, Connecticut, India and Israel. For more information visit: www.canaan.com .
About GrandBanks Capital
GrandBanks Capital invests in early stage companies located primarily in the eastern part of the United States. With headquarters outside of Boston, the firm was established in partnership with SOFTBANK Corp and has proven investment expertise in information technology, software, Internet and communications, media and financial services, and wireless technologies. The GrandBanks Capital portfolio currently includes; Colubris Networks, Coradiant, Ember Corporation, Enpocket, First Coverage, GlassHouse Technologies, Incipient, OutStart, uLocate Communications, Vella Systems, Vivox and xKoto. For more information on GrandBanks Capital, visit: www.grandbankscapital.com .
Posted at 11:38 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
November 08, 2007
Internet Telephony's Jajah Has IPO On Its Mind
There are a good number of well funded startups that are offering free/cheap voice calls over the net including Rebtel, Jaxtr, and Jangl. Other than Skype, Jajah may be the biggest with 50M users signed up in year one for its service which provides low price landline and mobile calls and free calls from user to user. To create separation, Jajah says it wants to IPO ASAP.
The firm's Austrian CEO and co-founder Roman Scharf told Reuters: "We'd need $100M - $200M to bring Jajah within a year to a level of 50M - 80M customers. We can do that and this would be the purpose of a possible IPO. We want to do this next year. We believe the second or third quarter next year might have the right environment for us to go public." Rebtel's chief investor is Intel as well as Sequoia Capital and Globespan Capital.
Jajah has teamed up with online advertising solutions provider Oridian to deliver a jointly-developed in-call advertising service, where users earn free minutes by listening to ads.
Read - Reuters
Posted at 10:35 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
November 06, 2007
Screen Junk Callers With Free YouMail
YouMail has raised $4.5M in a 1st round from VantagePoint Venture Partners. The Irvine, CA-based startup. It had raised $1.7M in an angel round last Spring and since hired a new CEO and CTO. Newish CEO Alex Quilici Alex was VP at America Online for its Voice Services Division.
YouMail offers free cellphone voicemail that gives users a personalized voicemail experience through a personal greeting for each caller. You also get to choose whether to access your voicemail over the phone or online, and to control who can leave you voicemails.
The company's knock-off of the Mac vs. PC commercial highlights YouMail's utility to ditch junk calls.
As for a business model, YouMail is running ads on its site but we wouldn't be surprised to see it soon begin to run ads on voice mails as well.
View - site
YouMail Raises $4.5 Million in Funding from VantagePoint Venture Partners
Tuesday November 6, 8:01 am ET
Craig Cooper, Co-founder of Boost Mobile, Joins Board of Directors
IRVINE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--YouMail, Inc. (www.youmail.com), the mobile industry’s premiere consumer voicemail service, today announced that it has raised $4.5 million in series A funding from VantagePoint Venture Partners. Additionally, Craig Cooper, venture partner at VantagePoint, will join the YouMail Board of Directors. YouMail will use the proceeds to invest in further product development and marketing initiatives, and expand its management and development teams.
YouMail provides consumers with a free cell phone voicemail service that allows them to better express their personality and to be more productive. YouMail users can personalize greetings based on caller id – recording greetings themselves, or easily choosing from a large and growing library of user-generated greetings and away messages. This lets users express themselves differently to their friends, family and co-workers, while maintaining a standard greeting for unknown callers. YouMail users can also access their cell phone voicemail over the web or in their e-mail, easily share special voicemails, and save them for life.
“Over the past few months, YouMail has been rolling out and steadily improving its innovative free cellphone voicemail service, and we look forward to working with VantagePoint to grow our business and expand our presence in the market,” said Alex Quilici, CEO of YouMail. “We selected VantagePoint as our partner because of the firm’s deep expertise and success in helping launch and grow some of the hottest new mobile companies in the market today.”
In addition to the funding, YouMail also announced that Craig Cooper has joined its Board of Directors. Cooper is currently a Partner at VantagePoint Venture Partners, and previously was a Partner at SoftBank Capital where he led the West Coast Digital Media and Wireless Investment Group. With more than 20 years of technology industry experience, Cooper was previously the co-founder of Boost Mobile USA, one of the first Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNOs) to develop a successful business model based on branded wireless services and content.
“YouMail has undoubtedly developed one of the most compelling mobile services that we’ve seen in some time. Because the company’s offerings are free, easy to learn, fun to use, and increase productivity, it will considerably shake up the existing category,” said Cooper. “We are excited to be investors in a company with such an innovative and global vision for the future of the mobile experience.”
About VantagePoint Venture Partners
VantagePoint Venture Partners provides creative growth strategies and capital to companies transforming global markets. With more than $4.0 billion of capital under management, the Firm invests in entrepreneurial companies at all stages of development in the CleanTech, Healthcare and Information Technology sectors. VantagePoint partners with talented entrepreneurs who are seeking to build companies that are world-scale in both size and substance. The Firm has created a network of thought leaders and strategic partners with some of the world’s leading corporations to provide portfolio companies with a unique advantage to accelerate growth. For more information, visit www.vpvp.com.
About YouMail
YouMail, Inc is headquartered in Aliso Viejo, CA. YouMail provides a free, dramatically better cell phone voicemail service that allows users to better express their personality and be more productive through a collection of unique and powerful features, and the leveraging of the YouMail community of users. The service has a growing set of distribution partnerships with major mobile service and content providers. To learn more and sign up for the free YouMail service, go to http://www.youmail.com. Inquiries regarding YouMail should be directed to RJ Bardsley, Racepoint Group 415-694-6701 rjbardsley@racepointgroup.com or Ken Brickley, YouMail 949-280-3815 ken@youmail.com.
Contact:
Racepoint Group
RJ Bardsley, 415-694-6701
rjbardsley@racepointgroup.com
Posted at 11:53 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
October 19, 2007
Vocalocity Raises $8M For VoIP PBX To Firms With < Than 20 Workers
Vocalocity has raised $8M in a first round led by Noro-Moseley Partners was lead investor with Pittco Capital Partners, and Imlay Partners. They seem to have a nicely priced system and now need to build their salesforce. The company charges $15 to $40 per month. You can order auto-attendant, voicemail to e-mail, follow me roaming, music on hold, simultaneous ring, conference calling and call queuing.
The company's CEO Boris Jerkunica previously ran Netzip which was bought by Real Networks.
Read - announcement
Posted at 11:33 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
October 08, 2007
Phonecasting Wants You To Call In To Hear Out Podcasts
Houston's PhoneCasting has raised $500K from angel investors. Founded in , Phonecasting allows users to listen to podcasts via their phones. So you can listen to Diggnation or Wall Street Confidential on your cell. The startup says it plans to raise $10M in Series A.
Is this what the world is holding its breath for? No, but there just may be a niche use here that takes off. We don't think millions will call to listen to Jim Cramer or Kevin Rose on their cell, but maybe there is something unexpected that would get people dialing.
Read - The Deal
Posted at 12:11 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
October 01, 2007
Skype No Viagra For eBay
The facts came out today that Skype founder Niklas Zennstrom is stepping down from his CEO post at Skype and that eBay is taking $1.4B in write-offs and charges related to the Skype acquisition. What is funny about this announcement is that it is fairly easy to make both arguments that either eBay was duped or that Skye founders and investors got shafted.
How could Skype have been shafted? eBay is only going to pay $530M of the $1.7B earnout. If you are in the Skype camp, you thought you were going to get $4.1B and now you find out you are going to get much less. Probably you blame eBay for not doing their part to make the Skype-eBay dream work. VC Ed Sim uses the Skype example to tell "company founders to be wary of performance based earnouts unless you get significant value upfront." Perhaps if Skype had been bought by another suitor it would have done better with more up-front and less earnout.
The more common argument is that eBay led by Meg Whitman are fools who don't get tech were easily duped by Skype and its VCs. Team Skype new there were never worth anything like $4.1B and the earnout was just theater.
For the venture sector at large its a reminder that mega deals can go sour. We hear again and again what a great deal News Corp. got on its MySpace deal and about how Yahoo screwed the pooch by not buying Facebook when it had the chance at an earthly valuation. Skype will be the new case in point for corporate development guys to pass on big deals and for founders and investors to pass on high earnouts.
Read - BeyondVC
Posted at 03:57 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
September 27, 2007
Chinese Video Biz PPLive Raises $21M
PPLive, a Chinese P2P video site, has raised $21M in Series B funding led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson with DFJ Dragon and return backers BlueRun Ventures. PPLive is a peer-to-peer streaming video network created in Huazhong University of Science and Technology that combines P2P and Internet TV, (aka P2PTV).
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Posted at 09:20 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
September 24, 2007
Stealth Mode Pudding Comes of Out With Free Ad Supported Phone Calls
Pudding Media will let you make free Skype-like calls so long as you are cool with having them scan your calls for keywords and have them serve ads to you. To give the ads greater accuracy, Pudding Media asks users for their sex, age range, language and zip code when they sign up. Pudding is running ads from a third-party ad feed, but says it plans to also sell its own ads in a few months.
We covered Pudding in stealth a couple of times, most recently in May when it raised $3.5M. The Israel and Silicon Valley company has been funded by Opus Capital, BRM Capital, and angels Ehud Weinstein, Ofer Shalvi and Yariv Gilat.
Pudding was founded by Ruben Maislos, formerly a senior executive at Intel Israel's cellular communications applications division. CEO Ariel Maislos was President of semiconductor firm Passave, which was bought by PMC Sierra for around $300M. Among their first employees is Eyal Karen, who was Director of Business Development at Amazon's A9.com.
The NY Times coverage focuses on the creepiness factor of an ad company eavesdropping on your phone calls. But Pudding responds that millions are used to Google and others monitoring email and inserting contextual ads and this is no different. Also of interest is that while Pudding calls now go through PCs, it may port to cell phones.
Read - NYTimes coverage
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Posted at 11:40 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
August 28, 2007
VoIP's Jaxtr Raises $8M A Round
Jaxtr has raised a $10M Series A round and the company now claims to have 1M users. Jaxtr is a VoIP startup that markets voice to social networks and blogs. jaxtr users can link their phones to their sites or social network page to receive calls, voice messages while keeping phones numbers private.
We imagine there will be all sorts of uses discovered for services like Jaxtr but clearly it is great for online dating. Founded in September 2005, Jaxtr comes with a fair number of features. Users can choose the phone where you receive your calls and they can block callers or specify on a per-caller basis who can ring your phone and who gets routed to voicemail.
Jaxt is led by Konstantin Guericke, who co-founded LinkedIn. Its founders are Touraj Parang and Phillip Mobin. The funding round was led by August Capital with Mayfield Fund, Draper Richards, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Mangrove Capital.
Read - TechCrunch post
Posted at 02:48 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
August 10, 2007
Marchex' Drumbeat On Local Ads Hits Voicestar
Marchex (NASDAQ) says it is paying $28M to buy VoiceStar, a specialist in call-based advertising services. The move established Marchex as a leader in annoying advertising. Marchex has spent a fortune on buying URLs that draw traffic based on misspellings of well known keywords. It is figuring out how to cash in on those keywords by tying them to local advertising.
Voicestar's scheme is to charge advertisers for every call that the receive. To be fair, there should be nothing annoying about pay per call (we have just been hit by too many marketing calls at home so are easily annoyed). Using VoiceStar, local advertisers that have yet to establish Web sites or sophisticated online marketing practices can place simple online ads that when clicked upon will result in trackable phone calls to these businesses. So users get what they want. Voicestar has a VERY impressive management team. With the talent that they have on-board, we'd be surprised to to seem them stay on with Marchex for long. First Round Capital and Felicis Ventures invested an undisclosed amount in VoiceStar.
With that, it is surprising how little revenue Voicestar has pulled in. Marchex tells investors to expect additional revenue of approximately $1.5M for the full year 2007 with just $500K in revenue between now and December. And with the headcount it is looking at a loss to boot.
Read - press release
Posted at 12:11 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
August 03, 2007
Automated Receptionist's IfByPhone Raises A First Round
Chicago startup Ifbyphone, which sells VoIP-based infrastructure to small and medium businesses, has landed $2.75M in series A funding. The funding round was jointly led by Origin Ventures and Apex Venture
Partners. IfByPhone charges $14.95 per month for its small biz package that provides the automated voice receptionist that is associated with big companies. Its ironic that the lousy voice service that consumers hate about big co's is now an object of desire for small companies that want to emulate them.
Read - announcement
Posted at 01:16 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
July 16, 2007
Sunrocket Vanishing. Are Vonage Users Dead Men Walking?
All things considered we have been happy early adopters of Vonage -except when we have tried to drop some extra lines and they hassle us mercilessly (read the recent law suit that AOL had to settle on this practice Vonagers).
But given what is happening today with Vonage competitor Sunrocket exploding in its customers faces, we don't think we can give Vonage the benefit of the doubt that it will stay in business. We'll probably now much more by the end of the week but various outlets, led by Gigaom, are reporting that Sunrocket could not get any more funding and its CEO pulled the rip cord leaving its customers to find their way alone in the telecom wilderness.
Sunrocket is the second largest carrier in the US and it raised $80M in funding. It claims 200K sorry customers. To all investors and execs at Sunrocket , you look bad, real bad.
Posted at 04:35 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
July 13, 2007
VoIP Noice Cancellation Firm NoiseFree Raises Seed
Voice techology continues its strong string of investments with Noise Free raising $1.4M in seed funding from ISB Ventures, the angel funding arm of Israel Beinglass, the former CTO and CMO at Applied Materials. Founded in 2005, NoiseFree has developed noise cancellation software for VoIP, which it plans to launch in next month.
Listen to some demos here.
Posted at 03:01 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
July 09, 2007
VoIP Gateway's U4EA Gets New CEO + $16M
U4EA Technologies closed on a $16M funding round, bringing total funding to-date to $30M. The Fremont, CA-based startup plans to use the dough to expand beyond hosted VoIP to include IP PBX and traditional PBX segments, and to build wireless capabilities into U4EA's product portfolio.
The company also hired Ken Epps as its new CEO. Prior to U4EA, he was the CEO of BayPackets.
U4EA Technologies was established in April 2004 as a spin-off of core technology and development engineers from Ericsson. The company is primarily funded by three European institutional investors: IIU Nominees Limited, Bluehone Investors, and Singer & Friedlander.
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Posted at 10:52 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
July 02, 2007
Google Buys GrandCentral
Voice technology is a nice spot to be in. Google has just bought GrandCentral after the startup raised just one round of funding and never got out of beta. We don't know how much Google paid at this point for Grandcentral but surely it was not as much as MIcrosoft paid for another voice company Tellme $800M or the amount that Nuance paid for VoiceSignal $293M. Given these great paydays it is surprising that we don't see more startup and funding activity in the voice area.
As a recap, San Francisco based GrandCentral was funded by Halsey Minor's venture firm. As Google puts it: "If you have multiple phone numbers (e.g., home, work, cell), you get one phone number that you can set to ring all, some, or none of your phones, based on who's calling. This way, your phone number is tied to you, and not your location or job. The service also gives you one central voice mailbox. You can listen to your voicemails online or from any phone, forward them to anybody, add the caller to your address book, block a caller as spam, and a lot more."
This should be a nice deal for all involved. GrandCentral gives Google a well regard product and team and it can promote GrandCentral like hell to get into people's phone networks.
Read - announcement
Posted at 05:58 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
June 25, 2007
We Almost Subscribed To Grand Central. Will Wait To See If Google Indeed Buys It.
Just last week, we thought of subscribing to Grand Central - the one telephone number/one voice mail service startup that has been funded by CNET founder Halsey Minor. But today, Techcrunch is reporting that Google may have bought Grand Central. Time and again when the oligopoly buys such services, prices fall or go to free. So we are going to sit on the sidelines and see what happens.
Grand Central raised Series A at $4M in 2006 from Halsey Minor. So if Minor sells the company now at $20M its a sweet deal. And for Google, they would get another innovative product that makes people happy for not much money. Grand Central competes with 1Num and RingCentral but Grand Central gets better reviews.
View - site
Read - Google To Acquire Grand Central (TechCrunch)
Posted at 01:17 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
Getting Reamed By Your Telco? Rivermine Can Fix That.
Fairfax, VA-based Rivermine has just raised $8.7M in new funding. The company says it has saves millions of dollars per year for Fortune 500 firms and goverments simply by analyzing their phone usage and suggesting cheaper ways to get the same service. ompanies can use the software to monitor the buying of telecom assets like cell phones and T1 lines, track those assets as they go in and out of service, and manage and audit invoices from vendors. Rivermine charges from $250,000 to millions of dollars per year, but it is representing companies that might spend $100M on telecom assets.
View - site
Posted at 01:03 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
June 18, 2007
Counterpath Pays $21.6M For VoIP's NewHeights
British Columbia's New Heights was founded back in 1998 and has raised $25M. So today's announcement that that it was being bought out by competitor Counterpath (OTCBB: CTPS) for an aggregate of cash and stock equal to $21.6M, qualifies as a save, not a win.
As part of the transaction, Wesley Clover, a private equity firm will invest in CounterPath. The combined entity says it wants to be the dominant endpoint provider for fixed and mobile operators and infrastructure providers across all desktop, embedded and mobile device platforms.
Counterparth says it will start selling New Heights' software to its customers like Vonage.
View - site
Posted at 02:57 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
June 15, 2007
Swedish VoIP Startup Rebtel Pays $75K For Rights To Spam House
Free or nearly free international cell phone call provider Rebtel has paid an LA resident $75K for the rights to blanket his house with Rebtel ads. The owner says he needed the cash as he couldn't pay his mortgage, although he now says he's going to spend some of the money on a Hawaiin vacation.
This reminds us of some of the nuttier ad ploys from the dotcom days. However, given the free publicity that Rebtel has received for the clever ruse, we would calculate it got a good return on branding dollars. CNBC interviewed the home owner, BusinessWeek has posted on it and now alarm:clock kicks in.
Read - CNBC story
Posted at 02:15 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
May 17, 2007
Hingi Raises $3.4M To Get You That Song In 2 Clicks
Amazon made a highly controversial patent claim on one click shopping that riled many in the tech world, but apparently the company found that One click shopping is worth it. Now a company in Israel is applying one click to the world of mobile ringtones (the company says it takes just 2 clicks). We wonder if Amazon will take this sitting down or if it will claim ownership over 2 click shopping as well.
Israel's Hingi has raised $3.4M from Opus Capital. The startups "Hear It ‘N' Get It" software enables fast purchasing of mobile content. Hingi says it reduces the process of mobile content purchase from 7 – 10 clicks to 2 clicks.
Hear It 'N Get It allows users to send SMS with the name or short code of most broadcast stations and then receive a list of the last three songs that were played, along with links to purchase the related content, including full MP3 download, ringtones, or a video clip, in one more click. The service works on all types of handsets and does not require any handset software, portal, or a search-engine.
Hingi was founded two years ago by president and CEO Eyal Katz who previously worked at Microsoft. In February, Hingi announced that Israeli mobile operator Cellcom, is offering the Hear It N' Get ItTM service to its customers.
View - site
Posted at 04:59 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
Stealth Voice App Co. Pudding Raises $3.5M First
Web-based voice applications developer Pudding Inc. has raised $3.5M. We posted on the stealth based company last month. It plans to launch an online shopping platform that is voice driven. The Israel and Silicon Valley company has been funded by Opus Capital, BRM Capital, and angels Ehud Weinstein, Ofer Shalvi and Yariv Gilat.
Pudding was founded a year ago by Ruben Maislos, formerly a senior executive at Intel Israel's cellular communications applications division. CEO Ariel Maislos was President of semiconductor firm Passave, which was bought by PMC Sierra for around $300M. Among their first employees is Eyal Karen, who was Director of Business Development at Amazon's A9.com.
View - site
Posted at 04:51 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
May 15, 2007
Mobile Voice's VoiceSignal Sold To Nuance For $293M
The ship has come in for text/voice companies with TellMe's huge sale to Microsoft and now this large deal. Nuance Communications (Nasdaq: NUAN) has agreed to acquire VoiceSignal Technologies, a Woburn, MA-based developer of mobile voice technology. The deal is valued at approximately $293M, broken down into a $204M cash payment and 5.8M shares of Nuance stock. VoiceSignal has raised over $21M since 2000, from Stata Venture Partners and Argonaut Private Equity.
Both VoiceSignal Technologies and Nuance have software platforms that provide voice-enabled mobile search and display results on the phone screen. To use local search with Voice Signal, users press a button, say what kind of business they are looking for, and where, and receive a list on their cell phones.
The service is supported by advertising and is free to the user, aside from the cost to access the data services. VoiceSignal says it will become available in Europe this year, is currently being tested with US carriers, and will ultimately include features like weather, movie times, stock quotes, horoscopes, and sports scores.
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Posted at 10:54 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
May 11, 2007
Jott And Pinger In Death Match Over Voice/Text
The alarm:clock wife, doesn't have time to read the site or follow tech, recently recommended that we start using Jott to create our grocery shopping lists. She had heard about the text to email broadcast system with her mom friends. That's pretty good viral we thought.
Today, Seattle-based Jott has taken a significant investment round from Bain Capital. Other investors in the 13-month-old startup include Ackerley Partners, Draper Richards and the investment firm of Niklas Zennstrom.
The company is not saying how many users it has but will say that roughly 70% of Jott's members use the service for both personal and business reasons, and most people use Jott while in their cars.
Jott hasn't yet finalized its revenues scheme, but says it plans to make money through subscriptions, advertising and/or premiums - the usual suspects.
We view the biggest competitor to Jott being Kleiner Perkins-backed Pinger. Pinger says it has grown rapidly since its beta launch in September 2006, increasing its user base by an average of 20% per week. It recently announced that it has made its service more friendly for Blackberry users giving them one-click access to their last 10 Pinger messages and streamlining the notification and retrieval process. It has a similar application for Palm Treo users. ComFi has another service in this realm that is apparent doing well.
In addition, to reaching the business audience through Blackberry, Pinger is also going to the younger market through commercials run on the site of MySpace King Bad Ass Frank, who is running Pinger commercials.
Read - E-mail by voice -- It's quite a deal
Posted at 09:49 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
May 10, 2007
Odeo Sold-off to Sonic Mountain
As a memory refresher, Evan Williams founded Blogger and sold it to Google. Then with some fanfare he launched and raised funding for podcasting startup Odeo. It didn't work out well so he did some complicated maneuvers to buy back Odeo from the VCs. Somewhere along the line he founded the Twitter application. He has now sold Odeo to Sonic Mountain.
Odeo quotes Hitwise: “Odeo is the only vertical podcasting site that has emerged from the pack: It has received five times more traffic than its nearest competitor." In a recent 30 day period Odeo served 700K uniques and 3M pageviews.
In a blog post last month Williams confessed: "In the last few months, we here at Obvious have been increasingly focused on Twitter. As a result, our original product, Odeo, has not gotten the attention it deserves. It does not cost us much to run—in fact, AdSense covers the hosting—but on the web you need to constantly improve, or fade away. We've put too much into Odeo to want to see it fade away. And it still has tons of potential. But we're not improving it fast enough.
It seems likely Odeo is worth more to someone else than it is to us at this point, so we're looking for a new home for it. We've been having some conversations with potential buyers, and this is our attempt to put the word out more widely in the most expeditious way (and without involving investment bankers and the like). If we don't get any attractive offers, we'll continue to run it."
There is no word on how much Odeo sold for, but Williams indicated he was open to variety of scenarios—from cash offer to an equity position. Sonic Mountain is a NYC-based company that was founded in November 2006 and says it is focused on Podcasting, however, before Odeo it did not seem to yet have a product.
Read - announcement
Posted at 01:09 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
May 09, 2007
Intel Wants Jajah To Be Its Skype. Invests $20M
In between 101 and 280, there is the conventional wisdom that eBay's Skype is dominant and mature. However, the game is far from over.
Intel today made a meaningful $20M investment into free mobile call startup Jajah. Language in the announcement was unusual in Intel Capital investments. Jajah will gain access to Intel's to community of product dealers, OEM customers and developers. Plus Jajah will have be part of Intel Capital’s IP Access Program, which will give JAJAH access to Intel’s extensive VoIP patent portfolio.
One possibility with Intel and Skype is to embed Jajah's voice calling features into PCs, so that users can make calls even when their computers are off or asleep.
Jajah says it currently has about 2.5M customers. It intends to use the funding and Intel connections to go after the small business market, which will include an advertising campaign to launch later in 2007.
Putting a cherry on tap, Jajah announced a new CFO who has public company experience at Verisign. Jajah was previously funded by Sequoia Capital.
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Read - Move Over, Skype: Intel's Backing Jajah (BusinessWeek)
Posted at 05:13 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
April 25, 2007
VoIP's Xconnect Flips Telcos The Bird, Raises $12M First Round
The ongoing saga with Vonage underscores the enmity between the VoIP upstarts and telcos. London-based Xconnect is sure to add fuel the the fire. The startup today raised $12M from Accel Partners, Venrock Partners, Grazia Equity, and Nikko Antfactory.
The company says its technology allows VoIP service providers to directly connect them with each other without hopping on to the traditional telco infrastructrutre where they get bogged down with fees.
The company is led by Eli Katz who is Chairman of the UK's VoIP association.
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April 17, 2007
Soundbite Files $69M IPO
We hadn't seen any advanced warning that SoundBite Communications was planning an IPO on the Nasdaq but today it has filed. The Burlington, MA vendor of on-demand automated voice messaging solutions, has filed for a $69M IPO.
Soundbite does in-bound and outbound voice and text messaging for applications such as billings and collections, account activation, contract renewals, welcome calls and fraud alerts. In other words, it creates canned messages for tasks where consumers don't expect a live person to get in touch with them. Soundbite's primary technology is automatic call flow management and answering machine detection. The company claimed sales in 2004 of $2.5M but we don't yet have an update since then.
Competitors are: Adeptra, Centerpost Communications, Par3 Communications.
The company has raised around $30.4M in VC funding since 2000.
VC firm Pre-IPO Stake
North Bridge Venture Partners 46.2%
Mosaic Venture Partners 20.9%
Commonwealth Venture Capital 16.5%
Venture Capital Fund of New England 9.9%
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Posted at 11:26 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
April 05, 2007
Israeli VoIP Tech's Veraz IPO Opens Flat
Veraz Networks [NASDAQ:VRAZ] today the priced of its initial public offering of 9M shares at $8 per share. This is a bit of a disapointment given that the IPO priced below its $10-$12 price range. The San Jose, CA firm raised $72M.
The maker of voice over Internet protocol gear for telecom carriers reported a 2006 net loss of $14M on revenue of $100M, compared to a loss of $14.3M on revenue of $76M in the year-ago period.
While Veraz's revenues are impresive, there seem to be concerns about its steep competition with: competition from Sonus Networks, Cisco and Alcatel.
Of the shares sold in the offering, 6.75M were offered by Veraz and 2.25M were offered by ECI Telecom. Following the offering, ECI will own 27.5%, or 23% on a fully diluted basis, of Veraz.
Other investors are:
VC firm Post-IPO holding
Norwest Venture Partners 10.8%
Battery Ventures 9.1%
Argonaut Private Equity 8.8%
Liberty Mutual 6.4%Levensohn Venture Partners 5.9%
Posted at 11:37 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
April 03, 2007
Voice Mail's YouMail Angel Funded. Gets New CEO
Irvine, CA's YouMail has raised $1.87M in first-round funding from the Tech Coast Angels. Also, Alex Quilici also joined the company as CEO. He was VP of AOL's voice services. AOL bought his voice company Quack.com in 2000 (it was a TellMe like startup.)
This Web-based application hooks up your cell phone voice mail to your caller ID allowing you to serve one polished message to clients and another message to your dive bar pals. YouMail also has other features including the ability to receive voice mail via email, check cellular voice mail online and the cruel ditchmail feature; an option that allows you to record a unique greeting for a specific caller, but then promptly hang up on the caller – not allowing them to leave a message at all. At Beta launch last fall it got some great reviews. The application is rolling out on Verizon, Cingular and T-Mobile and its free (we don't know how it plans to earn a living but suspect that they will get a spiff from the mobile carriers as other mobile ad-ons have done.)
Read - YouMail Launches Beta: A Mobile Crunch Exclusive (MobileCrunch)
Posted at 11:40 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
The a:c's Loser-Leave-Town Grudge Match With Vonage
We almost felt bad about having to call Vonage to cancel our service, given that they happen to be up against the ropes and one of the banks that took them public now has a sell rating on Vonage stock. Still we called to nix our service which we haven't used in 2 years).
Here's Vonage standard operating procedure:
+ First, they ask why you are canceling. Our answer: We have no need for the service and haven't used it in over 2 years.
+ Predictably, they throw a number of bonus offers at you in an attempt to salvage your account. We promptly said no to each offer, including the most cravenly desperate one: two free months of service. If you can't get your customers to pay for your service, give it away for free! They basically won't take NO for an answer.
+ The call center drones are trained to repeat your first name relentlessly -- we suppose that's meant to "personalize" the experience.
+ Once you've seemingly convinced them that you're serious about canceling, they pull out the final stop. They tell you they'll cancel, but that you'll need to call back on the day your account actually expires. In our case, this would be 3 weeks from today. It's a transparent ruse: they make you call back -- in the hope that you'll forget to call back. They even give you a "special direct line" to incentivize you to wait. We called bullshit, wouldn't hang up, and they terminated our account within 2 minutes -- and, in doing so, Vonage revealed its poorly masked lie.
It's too bad. We used to like Vonage. Now they've been reduced to spending their dwindling funds on call center training. They can't even get that right. The experience reminded us of our efforts to cancel our crummy AOL service when we moved to broadband.
Posted at 02:22 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
April 02, 2007
Vonage Competitor Sunrocket Gets 200Kth Customer
Given Vonage's recent headline grabbing woes, its competitor Sunrocket may have a chance to grab some customers. Sunrocket took the opportunity to report that it has pulled in its 200,000th customer. This compares to 2.2M subscriber lines at Vonage. Last August, Sunrocket raised $33M from VCs.
Posted at 01:46 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
Mobile VoIP: What's At Stake
We met today with Souheil Badran, Rebtel's President and GM of the Americas. Rebtel is a VC-backed, startup that competes with Truephone, Jajah Skype and others in the mobile VoIP market. The idea here is that international cell phone calls are way too expensive and can be dramatically reduced by running calls through VoIP.
We had suspected that the mobile VoIP market is huge but Badran gave us some numbers to put it in perspective. Each month there are 5.1M minutes in international mobile calls from the US to Mexico alone. When you think about all of the other country combinations that are possible the number of international mobile minutes has got to be in the billions.
Given this wide open market, how is Rebtel going to let potential uses know that it exists? Badran says that plan A is to get tech early adopters to try the service. The trouble with this strategy is that the hundreds of thousands of immigrants who are making calls from the US back to Mexico or elsewhere might not be avid readers of TechCrunch where they might learn of Rebtel. Badran says plan B is to do deals with the dozens or hundreds of calling card companies. This way users would never have to even access the Internet to create a Rebtel account or even know what is VoIP. All they will know is that they can talk a lot longer to their family back home on the same card.
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March 20, 2007
VoIP's Genband Funding Total Now at $205M
Investors in Plano, TX's Genband are doubling up on a bet that went south before, putting in around $15M in Series C funding at a post-money valuation of around $130M. Genband sells IP multimedia application and infrastructure products and solutions for VoIP and IMS networks.
Return backers include Sevin Rosen Funds, Venrock Associates, Oak Investment Partners, Granite Global Ventures, Alcatel, Siemens Venture Capital and Telesoft Partners. GenBand has raised over $205M in total VC funding.
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