eBuddy Announces 5 Million Euros from Lowland Capital

by Marshall Kirkpatrick on October 26, 2006

Web IM service eBuddy announced its first round of funding today, taking 5 Million Euros (about $6.25 million USD) from Lowland Capital Partners. Both eBuddy (formerly known as e-Messenger) and its funders are from the Netherlands. The company says it has 35 million users worldwide including 4 million mobile users. Founded in 2003, they say they are now adding more than a million and a half new users every month. We covered the first glimpse of this funding in June but the sum and funder weren’t announced until today.

eBuddy’s primary competition is Mountain View’s Meebo, a startup backed by Sequoia Capital. That investment was for $3.5 million based on a pre-money valuation of about $9 million.
eBuddy serves web chat sessions in a pop up window, Meebo in the primary browser window or in an embedded frame on other pages via their MeeboMe service. See our previous coverage of eBuddy here and of Meebo here. See also upcoming challenger Geesee.

You can see VentureBeat’s coverage here.

Comments

Masi - October 26th, 2006 at 4:24 pm PDT

Hey!

I just wanted to drop by and congratulate you on your speech during today’s videoconference (in the Bucharest Internet seminar).

I’m sorry you did not manage to finish your Stanford story, and I am really hoping you’ll continue it here.

Thanks for staying up late for the conference and for the great arguments (I sided with you during the discussion with Jeremy).

Peter Kazanjy - October 26th, 2006 at 4:50 pm PDT

Hey Marshall,

Meebo’s based in Mountain View. They just moved there from their former offices in Palo Alto.

wenkt - October 26th, 2006 at 5:01 pm PDT

Bonjour,

Je recherche des personnes pour promouvoir une nouvelle activité sur internet. La rémunération peut atteindre facilement 600 €uros par mois. Si vous êtes intéressés pour recevoir plus d’explications, contactez-moi en répondant par mail à cette offre.

archivelore@gmail.com

Cordialement.

greg passmore - October 26th, 2006 at 5:07 pm PDT

I just got back from a trip to Amsterdam and was staying right by the eBuddy office. It’s funny walking around all these old buildings in Amsterdam and you peek into what you think is a house and there are 10 people on iMacs or MacBooks all feverishly working on some internet company. It is a very common site interspersed with Hotels and houses on all the residential canal streets.

Marshall Kirkpatrick - October 26th, 2006 at 5:44 pm PDT

Thanks Peter.

Greag, thanks for the story.

wenkt, sollicitation en français n’est pas meilleure qu’elle est en anglais, vous allez un autre endroit!

Brian - October 26th, 2006 at 6:04 pm PDT

If any investors are reading this, I am building the next generatio of IM messaging.

Dave - October 26th, 2006 at 6:34 pm PDT

Interesting to see how these guys will apprach this burgeoning market. I think Meebo and E-Buddy are competing in a different with Geesee it seems. Example there are two types of burgeoning IM company (i) online clients for you existing IM (meebo, Ebuddy etc) - nice, but nothing earth shattering (ii) then you have the really intersing kind that are - distributed social networks across the long tail nature of online communications (InCircles, Geesee, etc).

A great example of a company that get’s this distributed social aggregation concept is MyBlogLog - I think it’s great that eBuddy got funded, but my gut tells me that the really big market potential is going to the company that connects the dots to these ever increasing niche social sites/blogs etc

AH - October 26th, 2006 at 6:51 pm PDT

Hi Marshall,

Your site has been blocking my comments since June. Are you guys playing favorites when it comes to certain IM players?

http://www.instantwebmessaging.com

Marshall Kirkpatrick - October 26th, 2006 at 6:59 pm PDT

Sorry about that. It’s a combination of WP and our third party spam filter. You can imagine how many spam comments we get here. Too many links in a comment is probably the leading cause of it. Drop us an email if you pour your soul out and it gets caught. If we can find it, we’ll fish it out of the filter.

AH - October 26th, 2006 at 7:56 pm PDT

Marshall, any time I mention the name of our website either as a URL, text or in the email address part of the submission form, it gets blocked (since June this year). I posted the alias domain above and used the hotmail address it went through fine. You know your site better than I, but to me it looks like our company name got tagged.

Boris - October 26th, 2006 at 11:30 pm PDT

Congratulations to eBuddy!

Dave - October 26th, 2006 at 11:38 pm PDT

so many players in the space:

meebo

ebuddy

iloveim

koolim

radiusim

messengerfx

it will be interesting to see what happens.

Yada - October 27th, 2006 at 2:39 am PDT

Some years ago the only one was e-messenger, and worked really good, even without “ajax” and VCs.

Patrick - October 27th, 2006 at 3:11 am PDT

Onno and JJ, congratulations. So that’s why you guys were away so much :). I guess we can expect something sweet from that dinner (stated in the sponsor contract for The Next Web) you guys still owe us!

@Greg If your visiting Amsterdam again, your welcome at our place as well. drop me an email.

Jur - October 27th, 2006 at 3:15 am PDT

Congrats eBuddy! Well done!

“You ain’t much, if you ain’t Dutch”

Steve Macdonald - October 27th, 2006 at 7:17 am PDT

eBuddy is borderline malware. It uses invasive tactics to trick children into installing it. I am constantly having to clean this gunk from the computers of friends and family.

Does anyone know of an eBuddy cleaner program?

JJRueb - October 27th, 2006 at 7:39 am PDT

@ Steve

If you look at eBuddy you see that you do not have to install anything. That is the idea behind web-based messaging.

pearlissimo - October 27th, 2006 at 8:57 am PDT

I love Meebo. Will have to check out eBuddy and see how it compares to Meebo

Marten - October 27th, 2006 at 2:17 pm PDT

Congratulations with the funding! ‘God’s final touch, he created the Dutch’

Steve Macdonald - October 27th, 2006 at 2:53 pm PDT

@JJRueb

Is this the same eBuddy that attaches itself to the browser and to the Windows IM client so that when people attempt to send email messages the eBuddy tacks on its own spam?

If so that this company is producing malware and should be shunned by everyone.

If this is a different company then I retract my comments.

Steve Macdonald - October 27th, 2006 at 2:54 pm PDT

“attempt to send email messages”

should have read:

“attempt to send instant messages”

Steve Macdonald - October 27th, 2006 at 3:01 pm PDT

My mistake.

It is not eBuddy I was thinking of, but some other spam company with Buddy in the name. I believe it is funbuddy.

Sorry, eBuddy!

Brian - October 28th, 2006 at 9:13 am PDT

Dave! Contact me I want to talk to you - You get it!! persolta@sbcglobal.net

amanda - October 31st, 2006 at 11:45 am PST

check out http://www.koolim.com

Bob - November 6th, 2006 at 8:02 am PST

Good work eBuddy! I must say eBuddy has improved a lot the past 6 months! I use it a lot at the office. I am curious about eBuddy’s future developements!

Bob - November 7th, 2006 at 5:18 am PST

I read that ebuddy offers a free mobile chat application as well.
If you have a xHTML or Wap 2.0 enabled device you can access your chat networks (MSN, Yahoo, AIM). A great way to escape your phone’s proprietary lock-ins.

* http://www.ebuddy.com/mobile.php