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September 28, 2007

Spanish Social Network, Wamba, Scores 3M Euros in Funding from Early Skype Investor

Mark Hendrickson

25 comments »

¡Que rico! Early Skype investor Morten Lund has gained 40% ownership of Wamba after making an investment of 3M euros in the Spanish social network.

Wamba launched this past March as a Pan-European social network but has recently focused on Latin America where it will compete with hi5, MySpace, and Orkut (although apparently with the intention of capturing the Spanish-speaking, not the Portuguese-speaking, market). The company plans to launch an IPTV called Wamba.TV and a radio music service called Wamba.FM.

Funding for Wamba previously came from Matias de Tezanos, who contributed $500,000 as an angel investor. The company was founded by Spanish entrepreneur Enrique Dubois.

Skype was acquired by eBay in 2005 for $2.6 billion. Wamba is presently valued at 7.5M euros.

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This entry was posted on Friday, September 28th, 2007 at 6:40 am and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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  1. Kristian

    September 28th, 2007 at 7:01 am

    Way to go Morten. I wish you all the best. You are one of the few danish entreprenours I admire. Thanks.
    Nothing af http://mortenlund.wordpress.com/ yet?

  2. coglethorpe

    September 28th, 2007 at 7:29 am

    Is this website simply for Spain, or can it cross over into any Spanish speaking market? If so, it probably has big long-term potential.

  3. RBA

    September 28th, 2007 at 7:40 am

    coglethorpe, unlike in the US or the UK, where most users concentrate in 2-3 sites, the Spanish speaking social networking landscape is a lot more diverse, with over 20 companies with moderate success competing to become THE destination that Facebook/MySpace is to the US or Bebo to the UK. So far, that hasn’t happened. I have a handful of favorites but let’s not spoil it :-)

  4. James

    September 28th, 2007 at 8:19 am

    Way to go Morten, Enrique and Matias..

  5. Ed

    September 28th, 2007 at 9:34 am

    @coglethorpe - Says it’s focusing on Latin America recently…and the depth and variety of the spanish language from country to country in central and south america is…..astounding!

  6. David Blanco

    September 28th, 2007 at 9:37 am

    Congratulations Enrique!

  7. Your Daddy

    September 28th, 2007 at 9:53 am

    As a Valley Latino in High Tech, I can’t help but ponder the fact that “¡Que rico!” was used on this one. What’s next? Yo quiero Tacobell? Let’s just hope you use other languages when this happens to… say Germany?

    :) Just stirring the crap

  8. coglethorpe

    September 28th, 2007 at 10:11 am

    @RBA

    Thanks for the information!

  9. mirunga

    September 28th, 2007 at 10:17 am

    Mark - please do a little bit of background research before talking about Spanish speaking social networks. Have you taken a look at hi5.com? It is by far the leading social network for Spanish speaking people.

    You mention MySpace/Orkut as the Spanish speaking leaders - what a joke. Maybe you need to look at comescore or even Alexa numbers. Try Mexico or any central american country and maybe then you will see who Wamba needs to compete with.

    http://alexa.com/data/details/.....rl=hi5.com

  10. Mark Hendrickson

    September 28th, 2007 at 11:22 am

    #7 - Your Daddy: Sorry you were bothered by the exclamatory opening to this post; I gotta put those 5 years of Spanish classes to use somehow =).

    #9 - Mirunga: Thanks for the tip about hi5; I’ve updated the post.

  11. Ivan Trajkovic

    September 28th, 2007 at 11:27 am

    Congrats to Enrique and Morten from EuropeanStartups:

    http://europeanstartups.com/ti.....investment

  12. Joe Clark

    September 28th, 2007 at 12:02 pm

    “3M Euros” – is that a new product from the makers of Post-it®?

    I know you’re American, but even an American should be able to type “€3M.” Either that or switch to describing U.S. deals as “3M dollars.”

  13. Jon

    September 28th, 2007 at 12:32 pm

    Enrique, Congrats!!!

  14. Rodrigo

    September 28th, 2007 at 1:28 pm

    RBA has it right, latam’s social network activity is sparsed among various sites and mirunda is also right with the penetration of Hi5 (the clear winner in mex and carribean countries)

    Dozens of startups are being launched following the facebook or myspace model… such as hispanito.com, Sonico.com (check alexa) and vostu.com (harvard crowd)… strategies that make sense since latam is at least 4 years behind.
    Wamba seems to have the right connections, cool name and now the cash. However there is a short window of opportunity in the coming months, probably the SN that get’s the network effects rolling the fastest wins.

  15. RBA

    September 28th, 2007 at 3:25 pm

    Rodrigo, Sonico’s growth in Alexa is not as organic as it may seem.

    Before Sonico, the company behind it (FNBox) was running several independent sites that now run under *.sonico.com, such as tupostal.com, now postales.sonico.com, or cumplealerta.com, now cumplealerta.sonico.com. That means that many of the visits scored by Alexa for sonico.com are the result of people going to the older sites and being redirected to the new ones. Note I see nothing wrong with doing that, but it’s something to keep in mind when looking at their stats - is the site leveraging all the visits towards the social network? Or many people are still just using the services that before were hosted under different domains?

    On the other hand, I don’t think Vostu got off to a good start. They launched a very successful PR campaign marketing themselves as “The Latino Facebook” but the truth is that the site didn’t take off in the first few months, and before you know it, they changed their strategy and now are more a “The Latino Ning” (with differences, people who have used both say that Ning is way more advanced). So the jury is still out for Vostu, although one has to agree their PR campaign was really good (it got you talking about them after all :-)

    As for the window of opportunity, it all depends. Everyone’s doing the same thing, and perhaps what’s needed is someone coming up with a different approach (hint: blabia.com)

  16. matias

    September 28th, 2007 at 4:50 pm

    Kike………….. WAMBA! I love so many people repeating the word! spread the love! spread the wamba! have a womberful day!

  17. DT

    September 28th, 2007 at 7:44 pm

    They gave away 40% for 3 million? Yikes…

  18. RBA

    September 28th, 2007 at 10:42 pm

    DT, you could argue that they might have done just fine by giving away 15% for €1M, but a €7.5M valuation for a company of this nature at this stage isn’t bad, plus you don’t know what they plan to do with the money. Maybe, just maybe they really need €3M.

    It’s funny… When we hear that such or such company got a valuation of $200M we think investors are crazy, we call up the bubble, etc. and when we hear a 7 digits valuation, then we think the entrepreneurs are stupid.

  19. Morten

    September 29th, 2007 at 12:51 am

    Kike, Waaaaaaambastic - way to go - http://www.SmilingFlyer.com are supporting Wamba worldwide

  20. German

    September 29th, 2007 at 4:26 am

    Mark: Take a look on this link, the map of social networks
    http://valleywag.com/tech/data.....273201.php
    In spanish and portuguese speaking countries Orkut, Hi5, Myspace and Fotolog (Hi Media company since last month) rules the market.
    Sonico and Facebook are growing very fast.
    Buying traffic in Latam is very cheap if Wamba want to build their users base with the Morten’s money.

    RBA: tell us more about blabia :)

  21. Lucas Rodriguez Cervera

    September 29th, 2007 at 8:07 am

    Great news not only for Wamba, but also for other spanish start-ups. It would be great if we saw more movements of this magnitud in the next months.

  22. Edo van Santen TV4B

    September 30th, 2007 at 1:28 am

    a video interview, at The Next Web 2007 conference in Amsterdam, with founder Enrique Dubois, can be seen on TV4B: see http://www.tv4b.com/index.php?.....ideoid=230

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