US Premium SMS service specialists SendMe Mobile raised another $12m (bringing the total to $35m) in order to fund their further expansion into the – what they call nascent – Premium SMS space. New boys Triangle Peak Ventures joined return investors True Ventures, Amicus Capital, Spark Capital and Grand Banks Ventures for the round (note to self: VCs need to get more creative in finding names for their firms). SendMe wants to use the cash for 3 purposes, namely a) working capital, b) acquisitions and c) “unforeseen challenges” of the economy. Unforeseen, huh?
- Premium SMS is considered nascent in the US (when it really is a fairly old hat in old Europe). Is simplicity saving the day? Should European firms maybe looking to repositioning this beautifully simple monetization tool rather than turning to more complex matters such as micro-billing, etc?
- Raising that amount of money in this day and age is respectable in itself. It does keep you wondering though where they are running with their cap table: on $35m total, their valuation must be somewhere in the region of $50-100m. That is big considering that the likes of Glu trade at 0.2x revenues or so.
- The aforementioned report mentions that reverse auctions (“SoLo”) had a “break-out year” for SendMe in 2008. This would arguably fly even higher in a full-blown recession (“darling, I just got ourselves an iPod for $1.34″), so might well have been the angle that made for convincing forecasts.
Twistbox has undertaken a reverse merger into a shell traded on the pink sheets (the unregulated stock trading system). It entered into a respective agreement with Mandalay Media, Inc., a company that was inactive since 2005. Twistbox is a spinoff from Waat Media, the mobile “late night entertainment” company. It was originally formed as a merger of Waat’s mobile game activities with German mobile game developer Charismatix. Since the spinoff in 2006, the company had raised about $32.5 million in funding, from Spark Capital, ValueAct Capital (cf. here) and some strategic investors, which helped it evolve into an internationally-active mobile content publisher, with branded WAP sites, video clips and games seemingly the spearheads.
The management team seems to remain on board. The move presumably serves as an exit for existing investors and – hopefully – a source for fresh capital. No word on further activities though, which is a bit of a pity. I shall therefore assume that my previous post still is valid.
