Jaxtr has raised a $10 million Series A round led by August Capital with Mayfield Fund, Draper Richards, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Luxemburg-based Mangrove Capital participating. They’ve also doubled their registered user base over last month, totalling 1 million users. They plan on getting to a break even point on the investment and to total 20 million users by the end of next year.
Jaxtr, like GrandCentral, uses VOIP as a utility to add features to your existing phone. Many other other VOIP startups focus primarily on cost savings (We have a roundup of VOIP services here). It’s service lets you anonymously post your phone number on the web and get cheap long distance calling rates. It works by connecting calls to your existing phone service through a Jaxtr number on VOIP. Calls are anonymous because they are made to a new Jaxtr number instead of your existing number. This lets you push all calls to voicemail and choose who can and can’t call through directly. Calls are cheaper because long distance calls are made over VOIP lines instead of standard phone networks. Jangl is another player in the category, also enabling you to control access to who calls your phone.
Although you can access the service easily through an embeddable widget, Jaxtr has found a lot of its growth coming from direct call links placed in emails or on non-social networking websites. Jangl has been expanding through a series of business deals, most notably with Various, Inc, Justin.tv, Fubar, and Revision3, bringing their online profile presence to over 20 million.
As part of taking the company to a break even point, they will be releasing a paid service, incorporating advertising, and pursuing new services on social networks (TBA). The paid service is expected to be their lead revenue generator, with the first paid component simply allowing people to buy more Jax, the virtual currency that converts into local phone minutes. Currently users get 100 free Jax each month, which convert into 100 minutes in the US, with conversion rates depending on local telco costs (sometimes as low as 15 minutes in Europe). Longer term plans include tiered monthly minute plans, like cell phones.
Their second revenue stream will be through on-site advertising within user’s Jaxtr accounts. A look at their Alexa traffic shows traffic growing noticeably upward in fits and spurts, mostly due to users checking their Jaxtr voicemail. Although the company currently isn’t disclosing traffic numbers, Konstantine doesn’t dispute the Alexa numbers. He explains the dips as periods during which they had trouble keeping up with the growth.
“totalling 1 million users. … They plan on getting to a break even point on the investment and to total 20 million users by the end of next year.”
and on the 7th day, they will rest.
He explains the dips as periods during which they had trouble keeping up with the growth = outages. Their lame Facebook toy is rife with feedback about being broken. I’m stunned that a company like this gets that 10M for what little it does.
I’m sorry, who?
1 million users? Is this legit? Is it popular in some other country or something?
I am in favor of making international calls from my phone at low cost. The more such services as Jaxtr the better is for consumers.
im beginning to wonder where all these users come from. I feel as if I am a very avid internet user and researcher and until many things pop up on crunch, i have never heard of them before, let alone any of my friends who dont even know what tech crunch is. I feel like we are entering/already entered into a day of bogus users/traffic and companies such as these, domain monetization sites, ad marketplaces, etc. that are leaving false hopes for people in the industry who think that they are generating real clicks, real traffic and real users. I dont believe 1 million users for a second. Lets get rid of these trash sites/traffic and look for more novel ideas who dont pertain to the average geek. Im not trying to be Mark Cuban, but come on…..Am i completely out of line?
If you do a Google search, you see not only many posts about jaxtr, but also many people posting their jaxtr link/widget. And the US is not the only country with Internet users anymore
If you look at sites like Microsoft, Yahoo, YouTube, Wikipedia, Skype, etc., you will find that over 80% of their traffic comes from outside the US. And that accurately reflects the number of Internet users in the world. While ad monetization is more difficult outside of the US/Europe/Japan/Australia, mobile phone operators and handset manufacturers are seeing strong revenues and the best growth in places like India and China. With 48% of visitors from the US, TechCrunch does not reflect the international nature of the Internet quite yet, but as it gets bigger, it surely will. We are pleased to be working on helping make the world a smaller place. And, actually, since most calls are made through jaxtr without an Internet connection (you just dial a local number to make an international call), a lot of the activity of our users is not measured accurately by the likes of Alexa compared to solutions where you initiate the call from the Web.
#3, I feel the same, one day someone (uncov?) will discover/prove a little dark secret of most of these startups. That is the act of faking and inflating the number of register members and traffic. I can see this as a easy and simple tactic at fooling VCs into handing out large sums of cash.
I was in business with a shady businessman a while back and he mention that only you always advertise your subscribers by a factor of 10X. He acted as if it was the ‘norm’ and you would be a fool to not do so.
This was 2 years ago and I an no longer working with this individual, but I not be surprise that a good number of startups advertise their membership and traffic by a factor of 100X.
My new ’startup’ has less than 100 users and I refuse to inflate this number for hype. Sites like TechCruch should also be wary of falling victim of these unethical tactics. When TC posts that site X has 10 million users where it only has 1K, people will belive in the lie b/c they see TC as a trusted site.
Hopefully the honest startups will survive the next bubble burst.
@marques, even if if they tell the truth, the question is not how many people registered, but how many use the service, how many minutes do they generate and how much revenue does it produce.
As I wrote before there is no such things as free calls http://www.flatplanetphone.com/wordpress/?p=278
The only question is how much does your VC have to spend, once that is used up…
Interesting. perhaps if they added an ‘e’ right before the ‘r’ in their name I wouldn’t bundle them in with billions of other Web 2.bore startups.
Interesting article, but I seriously doubt that Jangl has 20M users (20x Jaxtr’s number of accounts). A simple Alexa pull shows that Jangle is basically not a relevant company in this space: http://www.alexa.com/data/deta.....rfspot.com
Since Jangl and Jaxtr cater to similar audiences with likely comparable usage characteristics, one should have expected Jangl’s pageviews to be ~20x those of Jaxtr. Instead, Jangle is hardly visible on the Alexa chart.
Makes me wonder if Techcrunch checked the validity and reasonableness of their numbers before publishing this piece.
@Thomas, I bet my bottom dollar that TC does not, they push out 4 articles a day (quantity over quality???). I doubt TC spends any resources doing fact checking.
@ Thomas. This is Tim at Jangl. For the record, Jangl has never claimed it has 20 million customers. We have, instead, accurately claimed that we are in 20 million profiles worldwide — profiles in which calling is powered by Jangl. TechCrunch gets it right in the article above by stating that our newest partners brings our “online profile presence to over 20 million.”
This also addresses the flaw in the second part of your argument. Because Jangl’s partner deployments are custom-developed specifically for those partner environments, they don’t move the needle at all at Alexa — they’re not supposed to.
If you have any other questions about Jangl, please don’t hesitate to contact us, “Thomas.” We advocate transparency — and abhor armchair analytics — as much as you do.
Hi ,
through Jaxtr I hv got a US number and my uncle calls from US to that US number… is thats Leagal in US and India???