Cellfire Raises $10 m Series B
Michael Arrington
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MobileCrunch is reporting that Cellfire, which provides coupons via cell phone, is announcing a $10 million Series B financing on Tuesday. This follows a $4 million Series A from Storm Ventures. The company launched in June.
The round is being led by Menlo Ventures. The press release, which hasn’t hit the wires yet, is below.
SAN JOSE, Calif. - July 11, 2006 - Cellfire Inc. announced today that it has secured $10 million in Series B funding led by Menlo Ventures, one of Silicon Valley’s leading venture capital partnerships. The Company will tap this new financing to drive continued growth in the mobile marketing arena for its critically acclaimed mobile coupon service.
Launched initially in December 2005 to a controlled user base in California, Cellfire released its national service in June 2006. In early 2005, the start-up announced that it raised Series A funding from Menlo Park, California-based Storm Ventures. This latest round of funding will enable Cellfire to accelerate sales and marketing efforts, including product enhancement, expansion in business development and partnership activities.
“We are very pleased that Menlo Ventures led this financing, as they have had a tremendous amount of success investing in market-leading technology companies,” said Brent Dusing, CEO of Cellfire. “Our investors will help Cellfire realize its vision of delivering valuable discounts at every store and restaurant to every consumer in the country.”
Cellfire is a free downloadable application that provides valuable coupons from a host of local and national retailers within the user’s geographic region. It is the only mobile coupon service available today that provides money-saving deals for some of the most popular national venues. Current offers include rent-one-get-one-free from Hollywood Video, a free appetizer at T.G.I. Friday’s, as well as numerous discounts from retailers such as 1-800-flowers, Carlson Travel and other local retailers.
“In addition to their standout new mobile service, it was the talent of Cellfire’s management team that attracted us to the company,” said Doug Carlisle, Managing Director at Menlo Ventures. “We firmly believe that innovative entrepreneurs are critical to the ultimate success of a start-up. Cellfire is unique because it meets these criteria in addition to having a disruptive mobile solution.”
About Cellfire
Silicon Valley-based Cellfire is pioneering opt-in marketing solutions tailored for consumers’ mobile phones. The flagship service Cellfire is the first-ever application that consumers can download to their cell phones and begin receiving coupons to use at their favorite stores, restaurants and entertainment venues. Major brands such as Hollywood Video, Bath & Body Works, T.G.I Friday’s and 1-800-flowers.com are among the many retailers where consumers can get discounts using the opt-in mobile solution. For more information, please visit Cellfire at cellfire.com.
More on Cellfire here.
This is just stupid. What a stupid idea. Can’t belive someone just put 10 Mil on a the old coupon idea. What a waste.
congrats on the funding, good luck!…but I have to point out Cellfire’s system requires a client download to a mobile device…this is idiotic…the number of phones one has to develop/maintain an application for is an ever increasing number…this will change as cell phone manufacturers and service providers learn to collaborate, but I promise you it won’t happen anytime soon…Cellfire’s service is fairly straightforward and could have easily used SMS/MMS as a platform…providing them with a scaleable solution, and in turn their resources would have been better spent on the sales end, establishing merchant relationships…without these relationships their technology is useless…
Wow - only works with Cingular, and at that with only some of their phones. *yawn* The US mobile phone industry is such a mess I wouldn’t want to bet any money on any of it.
just like junk mail/coupons, $10M goes in trash. VCs are simply burining LPs money.
good luck if you want to give your mobile number for junk marketing.
get rid of the downloadable software and use the phone’s built-in browser instead. push alerts and coupons to the browser. this will work with a majority of the phones.
a lot of companies have done this before a few years back. why didn’t it work back then? and why would it work now?
$10m for coupons on cellphones? Wow.
There are (almost all until this pt) lot of -ve comments here. I guess authors are looking +ve towards whole experience. But I have to say one thing, concept is good. The problem, none if u give me merchants I want. Not travel agent (which I am gone use may be once a yr), but relevant coupons. I guess Brent and company will be spending much of this acquired money on these things. This makes me wonder though, they spent 4 million on just getting software up and running as well as 7 retailers on side.
I don’t know…one guy has better concepts mentioned above, it will be interesting to see why it did not work before. Or at least the names who tried if before so we can find out about those people.
Congrats and good luck to Cellfire!
Note: I used the application here in nevada and did not like it since it gave me hollywood video coupon basically useless, travel services or 1-800-flower which are better avaliable on internet, hey but i am still keeping application in case they come out with better things.
quick question.
my cellphone’s screen is always greasy (cause i put it against my ear). I feel embarassed to show my phone to a retail clerk to get my $0.50 off. What should i do?
will you guys bunndle screen whipes?
Cellfire has come under attack here for a variety of things, including a dearth of merchant relationships and coupon content. I can tell you that is the hardest part of the equation and it takes time, so be patient with them. I’m sure a chunk of their $10 will be used to establish a base of coupons. As a company addressing online coupons ourselves at http://www.zixxo.com, I can tell you it takes time. It always takes the pioneers a bit of time to hit the tipping point. But once they demonstrate the value and get more coupon content it will spread like wildfire…or cellfire :).
Congrats to Cellfire. This concept will require a lot of funding. Mainly for building a b2c brand and signing up merchants. As director at http://www.activemediatech.com i have spent the last 5 years cracking mobile coupons. we launched the successful mobile cinema coupon campaign in the UK called Orange Wednesdays. We also have taken it to other markets like Romania and India (Hutch Tuesdays). Cellfire concept is brilliant. Merchants will just not buy it that easily. It can take 3 years to get a good set of merchants all over the US. Additionally, merchants hate anything that takes more than a milli second to do a transaction. I believe the concept may transform more towards e-tailers and towards fragmented retailers who will see value in being part of a promotion that more than x million are accessing.