Big Money For Mig33’s Mobile Social Network
Nick Gonzalez
17 comments »
Mobile social network Mig33 has pulled in a $13.5 million Series B round led by DCM with participation from existing Series A investors Accel, Redpoint and TVP. Mig33 will put the money toward expanding the company in the U.S. and internationally. The company was founded in Perth, Australia, but moved to the valley after their Series A. They currently have over 9 million users (up from 7.5 million last October) in their global user base across more than 200 countries. You can see an earlier roundup of mobile social networks here.
Mig33 is a downloadable mobile social networking application with a bunch of utilities mixed in. Users can not only do the usual profiles and friending, but also includes VoIP calls, instant messaging, e-mail, text messaging, picture sharing. Long distance calls can be made by using pre-paid Mig33 minutes. They have an affiliate program for selling minutes and have even launched a calling card business in South Africa. Users have been signing on for more than a total of 2 million sessions per day, sending more than 45 million messages each day, and share more than a million pictures a month.
While many of us with “valley blinders” on would look to out ultra-portable laptop or iPhone to carry out most of these tasks, the rest of the world’s 2.6 billion subscribers turn first to a basic cellphone that runs one program at a time. Mig33 wants to be that one program.
Their application will work on most phones, including a long list of Nokias, Sony Ericssons, Motorolas, Samsungs, and others. With their eyes on the U.S. market, Mig33 plans on making smartphones fun and “dumb” phones smart by adding features like email and chat. I’ll be interested to see what they come up with, considering I’ve owned both a Blackberry and iPhone which already deliver on a lot of the features Mig33 has to offer. [Update: TechCrunch UK has a UK/European perspective on this].
