Tuesday, June 17, 2008
Cash and customers...
You might have seen it elsewhere, but... today we have announced that we raised $12.5M in our second round. The round is led by Nexit Ventures, the #1 mobile venture capitalist in my personal opinion. They are headquartered in Helsinki, with an office in Stockholm and one in Silicon Valley. The partner who joined the board is Michel Wendell. I have known him for years, since he invested in Bitfone. Together with our current investors Walden International and HIG, Castile Ventures joined the round. They are based in Boston. The partner who invested is Carl Stjernfeldt, who is Swedish, adding to the Nordic theme of the round ;-)So, yes, I raised money from Europe and from Europeans. Strange thing for someone based in Silicon Valley. However, now I have people on the board I can talk about soccer with... and they enjoy my espresso (known to be the best coffee in Silicon Valley). Definitely worth it ;-)
In the press release, AOL was so nice to let us slip in their name. We can't talk about it that much at this point, but it is a great deal for us (they have 200M users and are completely focused on advertising...). You'll hear more about it very soon.
Now if Italy would beat France...
Posted by Fabrizio at 08:30
3 Comments:
alexismonville said...
Great news Fabio !!
Congratulations
(since Italy is leading 2-0...)
Comment Posted at 13:36
Andy Wong said...
Just read your post at TechCrunch about Email spamming. I had a look at
http://www.funambol.com/news/Funambol_Ad-funded_Mobile_Email5.jpg
I would regard that the banner is a bit too big, compared with Google ad in Gmail. Google must have evaluated the ratio of ad on screen carefully a few years ago. So, why not follow Google's definition on ratio of ad? especially when the resolution of mobile screen is so scare.
Comment Posted at 17:46
Fabrizio said...
Hi Andy,
thanks for your feedback. We are a bit limited by the industry standard sizes for ads. The one we use is - I believe - the smallest out there...
In any case, if you try the application, you will see the banner takes out one email in the Inbox and a couple of rows in a single email. It is barely noticeable (unless the ad is interesting for you).
fabrizio
